Economics is all about how the allocation of scarce resources works.

The problem is that no economics can explain fully the human response. The explanation that it is, by definition, always rational is inadequate. Why then advertising? Why war?

No economics has any valid explanation for human behaviour at our ecological limit, as has been amply demonstrated since the financial crisis first broke. Nor does it have any valid explanation for managing the commons. In fact, our most important ecological goods of clean air and the hydrological cycle aren’t valued at all!

Malthus was wrong, to the extent that food production couldn’t keep up our population (atleast for now), but our ecological limits ensure that quality of life must be increasingly rationed (or unequally ditributed) as population increases. I get to live a relatively extravagant life, as long the vast majority of the world remains poor.

Despite being the most significant environmental (and human) problem, I’m afraid it will probably be the most ignored. Any “solutions” seem far too draconian for most people’s tastes.

I’m not exactly sure how this ties into Austrian Economics….

Any ecologist will tell you that when an organism over-populates its environment one or two problems arise, particularly if some other factor such as climate change occurs simultaneously. The two problems are shortages of resources and damage to the environment.

I am not necessarily talking about humans in the paragraph above, but some of the terms may sound familiar, even to people on this site. And by the way, this has happened to humans several times in our history (Maya, Easter Island etc).

Maybe we are so clever nowadays that there is absolutely no chance that we are in overshoot now. That would be too Malthusian an explanation surely!

i am still unsure about curbside recycling programs.
a landfill in my area was recently closed due to capacity i believe. it kinda smells in the summer but i believe it is geologically sound so no leachate will harm anyone..right next to a water treatment plant in fact and near the citys water supply.

i dont know if city trucks driving hundreds of miles around the city is better than if Alcoa was doing that.
my guess is that with aluminum, one the price gets to a certain level, will either be substituted for waxy paper containers or plastics. or some type of aluminum can return at the grocer or wal-mart would spring up…and freightcarriers would just pick up the scrap and deliver it to processors. profitably.

i am still unsure about curbside recycling programs.
a landfill in my area was recently closed due to capacity i believe. it kinda smells in the summer but i believe it is geologically sound so no leachate will harm anyone..right next to a water treatment plant in fact and near the citys water supply.

i dont know if city trucks driving hundreds of miles around the city is better than if Alcoa was doing that.
my guess is that with aluminum, one the price gets to a certain level, will either be substituted for waxy paper containers or plastics. or some type of aluminum can return at the grocer or wal-mart would spring up…and freightcarriers would just pick up the scrap and deliver it to processors. profitably.

I believe Rothbard wrote about this in one section of “For a New Liberty.” If I recall correctly, he mentions that during the Industrial Revolution there were factories that emitted silt and various kinds of industrial waste that floated downstream in creeks and rivers, contaminating farmers’ grazing lands. The farmers sought redress in the courts on the basis of English common law, but the government judges ruled in favor of the factories on collectivist grounds: The factories were employing masses of people and therefore supplying a “common good.”

Some organizations, like the Nature Conservancy, buy up land to make it into preserves. That’s a pretty good example of free-market environmentalism.

If private interests can’t preserve a clean environment, then the only alternative is government acquisition of land ,or government mandates on development. I don’t think most people on here would prefer that.

As for the articles, the DDT one is very good, but the recycling one is just a retread of an argument that has been presented a thousand times. It’s certainly possible that many materials would require less energy to harvest rather than recycle, but it’s naive to assume that our current market system is going to make this choice obvious. Much of logging is done on public land, serving as a huge subsidy and the actual cost of waste disposal is paid for by us. According to a Danish Technical Institute study “from 188 scenarios that included recycling, the overwhelming majority of them (83%) favoured recycling over either landfill or incineration.”

frankly, i’d prefer clean air and clean water and better health than the ‘latest technology’.