Good morning.
It’s snow for Whitewater today, with several inches expected, and a high temperature in the mid-twenties. For Atlanta, showers and windy, with a high of fifty-nine.
On this day in 1915, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposal to give women the right to vote, 174-204.
Whalers kill more whales than ever before, despite the efforts of conservationists and animal right activists, but there’s a solution: A Market Proposal for Saving Whales. Here’s the idea:
The proposed market would be patterned after a system known best known from fisheries management as catch shares: Sustainable harvest levels are quantified, a maximum quota established, and catch allotments put up for sale by the International Whaling Commission. Costello’s proposal would add the crucial wrinkle of allowing activists to buy shares, too. If they did, a corresponding number of whales would be removed from the quota. (Indigenous groups would receive a set number of shares to be owned in perpetuity, apart from the market — though those could conceivably be sold, too.)
According to Costello’s estimates, global whaling profits amount to $31 million, and likely less when government subsidies are removed. Mainstream anti-whaling groups — Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and the World Wildlife Fund — spend about $25 million to fight the hunts.
“This money could be used to purchase whales, arguably with the same or better effect,” write the researchers in Nature.
Conservationists may not want to put a price on a whale, but they’d save more of them this way than are saved now.
Google has a particularly interesting puzzle for today: “Which would be bigger: the offspring of a female lion and a male tiger, or the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger?”