Thanks for all the great comments and questions. We've taped Prof. Gerritsen's response video and will post it as soon as it's been edited.

Dear Margot

How do you think a model can be developed, using rational expectations of any and many (n) agents in certain economic activity and considering an informational set for all of them and make forecasts for, though a set of important variables.
Once we have done that, how do you think we could link the interaction between this model with an ex-post signaling made from the future ?
If it were posible to do this, firms could interact reasonably with that future signaling throughout this models and thus, to gather the real preferences of those future generations about the use of the land.... See More
One of the main concerns about the environmental impact is precisely that it is very difficult to the society to assign the real value associated to, as an example, reductions in annual greenhouse emissions due to industrial process or even land use and biomass burning.

In economics we think in rational people who have expectations about the future and that the interaction of all those people are capable to reflect all the information in prices, even internalizing future and unknown information, so if rational expectatives considers informational sets from t+1 ....t+n , n=1 to infinite, it is expected to be possible ex-post to modify our behavior throughout an ex-post signaling.

Maybe we cannot talk to the future throughout a price, but at least we can simulate with certain confidence what the future generations expects about the use of the land, not only in oil projects but thinking in Hydrolic Generation frequently needing to flood thousand of virgin acres devastating their threes and animal life.

Even in whales hunting, it could be irrelevant for future generations to change or not the state of the nature because they value more the human being whose has been feed with its meat than the extinction of that specie ... which anyway could have been replaced by the rise of a similar one or even due to unknown reserves ... who knows.

The main concern to make a confident model anyway must to rely on who is signaling on the other side ... Don't you think ?

A telephone to the future and beyond

What I'm trying to say is that it would be very interesting and useful to start-up building an inter-temporal telephone in a way of a more complex model asking for many unsolved questions about preferences of the society in the future in economics, politics, engineering and what is most important being sure about who is answering the phone.

For example if we are asking about what happens in the oil market, maybe what we have to do is to analyze the expectations of the incumbents in that market whose has better information about that resources and maybe because the future exhaustion of an ore could have an hard impact on current prices and it's not improbable that the information conveyed in prices can be internalizing those future efects ... maybe if we think in a continuum of links between all the economic agents, the market could be capturing valuable information from the future whish could be validated for people from the same project ( reliability ) or even better answered by reliable people every year or each five, ten or hundred years in the future. ... See More

I think questions as it is the case of the Canadian Albertan Mining Minister who says "that land must be protected for future generations and be replaced as it is" might have a hard arguments being rigorously documented.

This is specially important for environmentalists who have a lot of scientific information but they are stil not capable to give in present value the real alternative cost of the land use to prevent Industrial Processes as you has show in your interesting videos, despite the fact that if that oil is not exploit right now it could have a hard impact on the economic activities and even on the life of the people who will see the transport system, the food production and supermakets virtually stopped.

Of course this is just a suggestion and just an idea caming from the concept and issues such as "Options and Future Markets" where we always had that horrible doubt about if really there are people hearing at the other side of the phone.

it is very nice prsentation

Of course it is, definitely !