Abstract
Ecosystems services include the collection, concentration, and storage of solar energy as fossil fuels (e.g., coal, petroleum, and natural gas). These concentrated forms of energy were produced by ancient ecosystem services. However, our legal and economic systems fail to recognise the value of the ecosystem service subsidies embedded in fossil fuels. This ecosystem services price subsidy causes overuse and waste of fossil fuels in the free market: fossil fuels are consumed more quickly than they can be replaced by ecosystem services and in far larger quantities than they would be if the price of fossil fuels included the cost of solar energy collection, concentration and manufacturing of raw fossil fuels. Moreover, burning fossil fuels produces enormous environmental, human health and welfare costs and damage. Virtually no legal literature on ecosystem services, sustainable development, or sustainable energy, considers fossil fuels in this context. Without understanding stored energy as an ecosystem service, we cannot reasonably expect to manage our fossil fuel energy resources sustainably. International and domestic energy law andpolicy systems generally ignore this feature of fossil fuel energy, a blind spot that explains why reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is fundamentally a political challenge. This paper will use new understandings emerging from the field of complex systems to critique existing legal decision-making models that do not adequately account for energy ecosystem services in policy design, resource allocation and project approvals. The paper proposes a new "least-social-cost" decision-making legal structure that includes ecosystem energy services.KEYWORDS: Ecosystem services; ecosystem energy services; sustainable energy; energy law; energy policy; climate change; fossil fuels; global warming; market failure; environmental externalities; energy subsidies; ecosystem services; ecological economics; complex systems; renewable energy; energy efficiency
Highlights
Our burning of fossil fuel has released and continues to release enormous quantities of ancient carbon into the atmosphere with relative suddenness, causing local, regional and global ecosystem harm and threatening abrupt and irreversible shifts in the state of the ecosystem as critical thresholds are approached.[3]
In an effort that ran parallel to the exploration of ecosystem services and national environmental accounting, the idea of internalising externalities was actively pursued by advocates seeking to reform the United States electric utility regulatory system.[111]
International law treats them as private property under the principle that national sovereignty grants the ownership of fossil fuel resources to the nation within whose territory the resources are located.[159]
Summary
Our burning of fossil fuel has released and continues to release enormous quantities of ancient carbon into the atmosphere with relative suddenness, causing local, regional and global ecosystem harm and threatening abrupt and irreversible shifts in the state of the ecosystem as critical thresholds are approached.[3]. Ecosystem services study is a subset of the larger ecological economics project of "getting the prices right,” because" [a] decision not to consider external costs in itself quantifies them by setting their value at zero."[18] Recent developments in these related fields supply methodologies that could illuminate the blind spot and narrow, to the greatest extent possible, the gap between law and reality.[19 2] Fossil fuels: thermodynamic marvels made by nature. Hundreds of millions of years."[22] The ecosystem service of collecting, concentrating, and storing solar energy as fossil fuels (e.g., coal, petroleum, and natural gas) plays a central role in the human story. These fuels are concentrated forms of sunlight made and collected and stored by ancient ecosystem services. Significantly affect energy security— the reliability and resilience of affordable energy systems.[33]
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