I’ve seen proposals for buying coal mines as a way of efficiently reducing emissions, by reducing the supply of coal and thus driving up coal’s price on the open market. But how does that balance against the increasing the demand for coal mines, thus encouraging coal prospectors to seek out new coal sources?
Intuitively, this doesn’t seem that likely; it feels like new coal sources should be pretty hard to discover? But two worrying examples that come to mind include:
Discovery of fracking techniques, which lowered the cost of oil
One reason this has been on my mind: I wonder whether paying AI researchers lots of money to not do AI research would slow AI timelines, or would drive more people into research...
My sense is that coal mines 1) take a lot of money to make in the first place and 2) have poor future prospects. So the thing that happens if you buy a 40-year old coal mine with 10 years of coal left, and shut it down instead of operate it, is not that someone else just opens up a new coal mine with 50 years of life on it. [But this is probably more of a local effect than a global one—people are actually opening new coal mines somewhere.]
I’ve seen proposals for buying coal mines as a way of efficiently reducing emissions, by reducing the supply of coal and thus driving up coal’s price on the open market. But how does that balance against the increasing the demand for coal mines, thus encouraging coal prospectors to seek out new coal sources?
Intuitively, this doesn’t seem that likely; it feels like new coal sources should be pretty hard to discover? But two worrying examples that come to mind include:
Discovery of fracking techniques, which lowered the cost of oil
(Apocryphal) the cobra effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
One reason this has been on my mind: I wonder whether paying AI researchers lots of money to not do AI research would slow AI timelines, or would drive more people into research...
My sense is that coal mines 1) take a lot of money to make in the first place and 2) have poor future prospects. So the thing that happens if you buy a 40-year old coal mine with 10 years of coal left, and shut it down instead of operate it, is not that someone else just opens up a new coal mine with 50 years of life on it. [But this is probably more of a local effect than a global one—people are actually opening new coal mines somewhere.]