At this week’s Rose Cafe event, three professors (Shanjun Li, Greg Poe, and David Wolfe) came to speak about contemporary environmental issues, offering an economist’s take on them. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Lake Source Cooling is an environmentally sustainable project that keeps West Campus chilled by using Lake Cayuga as a heat sink. I was also quite interested to learn about Cornell’s ties to environmental activism and the creation of technology for sustainability initiatives.

Yet what stood out to me was the emphasis on creating incentives to drive environmental change. This makes some sense to me as a psychology student; rewards are typically better at shaping behavior than punishment, as the latter only informs the subject of what they shouldn’t do, not what they should do. Spritzing a puppy with water because he made a mess on the kitchen floor will discourage further accidents in that room, but the little fur ball may just ruin your bedroom rug instead of learning to use the newspaper corner. The capitalist economic system we currently inhabit thrives on self-interest and typically looks scornfully on restraints that threaten its expansion. Environmental policy can thus be made more effective by giving regulations a new spin; instead of looking at them as punishing polluters, rework them so that they are seen as rewarding efforts to reduce pollution.

The importance of incentives also relates to the impact of the falling price of oil. Many recent projects once promoted by the fossil fuel industry have gone south simply because they were not profitable. The Keystone XL pipeline was seen as not worth the controversy when the oil it would transport became less valuable. Oil exploration in the Arctic has stalled due to the same phenomenon. While these recent developments do demonstrate how political resistance can block undesirable business deals, they also suggest that if something is valuable enough, people will be willing to deal with lots of flack in order to obtain it.