🚀 go-pugleaf

 
 Re: Dealing with resource degradation via economics:

 * Reposted...

   Yep, Alan McGowen wrote on 23 Feb 95 about: Re: Demand:
 
  Mark Roberts:
 > Without some mechanism to
 > make new resources more expensive to use and more 
 > commensurate with the actual cost of replacing the resource
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 > the destruction of resources will continue.  > Mark Roberts.

... Alan McGowen writes:
 It's worse than that. The replacement mechanisms for biological
 resources are ecological and evolutionary processes that are
 themselves often in jeopardy. Assuming that there could be a
 price mechanism which reflected the actual "difficulty" of 
 replacing resources, it would have to value the replacement 
 mechanisms quite highly -- because, as they deteriorate, the 
 replacement rate of the resource in question is reduced. But
 1) these replacement mechanisms are far from perfectly understood,
 and 2) they themselves depend on biological diversity on many
 different scales. Everything thus turns out to be hitched to
 everything else: you wanted a replacement cost for the wood
 of one species of tropical hardwood. You find out that it 
 depends on the replacment costs of fruitbats and other species
 they eat, thousands of (mostly unknown) insects, thousands of 
 (mostly unknown) soil organisms, the microclimate of the forest 
 resulting from the all evapotransiration going on, and many other 
 things, probably quite a few of which we haven't a glimmer about. 

 There is no way in hell to map that much unknown complexity 
 into an "actual cost of replacement". The emergy analysis shows
 that the 'actual cost' of typical destructive extractions 
 is undoubtedly orders of magnitude outside the reach of human 
 economies. But it doesn't even touch the question of replacing
 the replacement mechanisms. In short, it shows that 'actual
 costs' are another myth of humanist arrogance.

 Alan McGowen


... Why are most 200+ year-old ideas old fashioned except economic theory?