Hoping to defuse a three-decade-long feud over whale hunting, three academics are making an audacious proposal: the world should put a price on killing whales, and allow conservationists and whalers alike to bid on the right to take them.

Calling it “a market that would be economically, ecologically and socially viable for whalers and whales alike,” an economist and two marine scientists suggested in a commentary published by the journal Nature on Wednesday that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) could allocate catch quotas between whaling and anti-whaling nations while holding some back for an open auction.

The idea of a market-based trading system for commercial whaling is not unprecedented — a Canadian natural resources professor mentioned it in 1982, and a Virginia economist offered a more detailed scenario a decade ago. But the new proposal is attracting interest from Obama administration officials as well as some environmentalists, who have become frustrated by the ongoing impasse over how to enforce a global whaling moratorium rejected by Japan, Iceland and Norway.

Over the past three years, an average of nearly 2,000 whales have been killed annually by Japan, Iceland and Norway, along with aboriginal groups in Denmark, Russia and the United States. That’s more than double the yearly toll in the 1990s.

Both the Obama and the George W. Bush administration sought to forge a global deal that would have allowed whaling nations to hunt whales legally as long as they curbed their catch. Japan takes about 1,000 whales a year for “scientific purposes,” while Norway and Iceland take about 600 whales annually between them.

But those efforts floundered in 2010, leaving conservationists and whale hunters still divided on how to regulate whaling.

Christopher Costello, the new paper’s lead author, called the current system “totally ineffective” because “everyone thinks they ether have a right to whale or let whales live.”

Click here to read the rest of the article.