A Case for Government Regulation?

Here is an op-ed from the NYT about invasive species. Invasive species are species that are transported out of their original habitat into new areas where they have subsequent harmful effects. Many of these species are carried in the ballast water of ships from all over the world. If you don’t have a subscription to NYT online (it is free) here is the article:

When Nature Assaults Itself
By ALAN BURDICK

LATE one afternoon not long ago, I stood on the bridge of an Alaska-bound oil tanker, trying to divine our ecological future from the encircling horizon: a gray band of haze separating an overcast sky from the slate-gray sea.
One key element of this future lay not in the surrounding sea and sky but several decks below my feet: the countless plants and animals - from single-celled diatoms and dinoflagellates to microscopic, shrimplike copepods, larval mollusks and crustaceans - thriving in the million-odd gallons of ballast water the ship had taken on in San Francisco Bay and would eventually deposit north of the 48th parallel, in Valdez. In recent years marine biologists have documented that an astonishing range of living organisms is inadvertently carried in ballast water to ports around the world, threatening our economies and our health and diminishing the biological diversity of Earth as a whole.
Far from the minds of the founders of Earth Day 35 years ago, invasive species are a new kind of threat, wrought by nature against nature itself - albeit with an assist from humankind. The hazards of pollution and habitat destruction are comparatively easy to grasp. Invasive species impose a different variety of environmental changes - often subtle and slow to manifest, hard to forecast and challenging to combat.
At any given moment some 35,000 ships large and small are at sea, bearing our wants and needs - petroleum, corn feed, wood chips, automobiles - from one port to another. Ballast water is essential to that motion. Taken on to aid stability and propulsion, ballast water does for the modern cargo ship what sandbags do for a hot-air balloon. Unfortunately, it can also carry comb jellies from the East Coast to the Black Sea, Japanese sea stars to Australia, and voracious green crabs from Europe to San Francisco Bay.
Many, perhaps most, of the organisms do not survive their odysseys. But with so much ballast water in motion around the world, many organisms inevitably do. And even one can inflict profound changes on its new habitat. The Eurasian zebra mussel reached Lake St. Clair via ballast water in the 1980's; it now lives throughout the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and in more than 350 lakes and ponds. No larger than a pistachio, it thrives in such dense profusion that it has sunk navigational buoys. It crowds out native species and hogs the nutrients that other organisms require.
Our current environmental legislation is poorly equipped to cope with this kind of invasion. Laws like the Endangered Species Act are intended to protect specific, known organisms from specific, known threats. Ecological invasion does not submit to such clarity. One can identify which species, like the zebra mussel, have already proved troublesome. But as great a risk comes from the yet unidentified invaders - the zebra mussels of tomorrow. Scientists cannot accurately predict which organism will invade where, nor which native organisms will be most affected when the unknown threat arrives. The only certainty is that, inevitably, something - many somethings - will invade, by which point the moment for interception will have passed.
Congress is finally grappling with this new ecological reality. Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced the National Aquatic Invasive Species Act of 2005, which would authorize money for research, the control and monitoring of existing and new threats, and the improved regulation of the biologically rich ballast water that arrives with international ships. Notably, it would require all ships to report their ballast operations and would offer ship owners incentives to test new ballast-treatment technologies. The bill is a worthy effort to update the National Invasive Species Act of 1996, which expired in 2002. Critics may carp about the cost - $836 million over several years - but that is a small fraction of the cost that the zebra mussel already exacts.
In the end, alien species are a reflection of us; they are the respiring extensions of our own ambitions on Earth. Where we go, they follow. But it needn't be that way. As biological entities, invasions may be natural, but that doesn't mean they're welcome.
Alan Burdick, an editor at Discover, is the author of the forthcoming "Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion."


Is the federal government the best person for the job on this one? Is there any way the free market could internalize this externality? I don’t know if there is b/c of global nature of the problem. The fact that these species are so widespread around the globe the transaction costs would be astronomical. Perhaps this is a good case for government intervention. What do you think?