> Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems

Markets solve diffuse problems really well, people signal how much their section of the problem is worth solving and the market judges whether the overall problem can be solved cost effectively. Getting food to everyone is a diffuse problem for example.

Tragedy of the commons is different. Markets don't solve how to solve owning things in common and the usual market recommendation is not to do that.

How much money does a golf course bring in yearly? How onerous are the regulations?

How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?

Let's compare to agriculture.

An acre used to make hay might bring in $500/year.

An acre used for PV might bring in $25,000/year.

If PV uses too much land, do we want to talk about what agriculture is doing?

> If PV uses too much land, do we want to talk about what agriculture is doing?

If we’ve worried about land why not go for nuclear? Just plant nuclear reactor seeds add fertilizer and power plants spring up in a few months.

See it doesn’t quite work that way. It brushes away too many variables.

It's probably easier to build a solar farm than prepare new land for hay production at this point.

Have you noticed the price of beef going up? It's because we're losing arable land to climate change. It takes a large number of high quality acres to raise a cow on grass.

That's been getting less and less feasible over time between extreme weather and erosion, so the cows get hay instead.

Hay production in places like Texas is disrupted by drought every few years, which means that ranchers have to sell their cattle at a loss or let the cows starve in the fields (assuming they don't die of heat stroke - the cows and the farmers).

After a few bad cycles like that, the ranchers start selling off land, so there aren't enough cows even in good years. Presumably this is bad for hay farmers, since demand attenuates down to what it would be in a drought year.

That brings us to 2026. It's pretty clear what's coming next.

I’ve looked into buying grassland. It’s in in the middle of nowhere. $25k/year is before maintenance and grid hook-up costs, both of which will be substantial in the middle of nowhere.

Also what is the capitol cost to stand up a golf course vs. a solar farm of equal size? I would imagine solar requires locking up a much larger investment.

For PV, land will be a very small fraction of that capex.

Yeah; golf course land tends to be in places with high property values.

If we normalize by $ instead of by acre, the hypothetical golf course conversion would produce >> 10% of land requirements.

I think you have misunderstood the term "tragedy of the commons", which is a phenomenon distinct from a market failure. Also, "markets allocate resources based on supply and demand" is, I believe an oversimplification one should not carry beyond Economics 101. If that were sufficient to explain the totality of market behavior, especially at large scale, then the remainder of the discipline of economics need not exist.

That comment throws all econ 101 in the wrong way. A land owners decision to build a golf course over solar farm is a decision based on competing land uses which are demand/supply for land and the potential services you could provide on that land. Which is why you don't often see solar farms or farms or power plants in the middle of cities...

Nice expression, but the book by the same name is fatally flawed in its science.