[titzer]

I am skeptical of pretty much all analyses of recycling and environmentalism that start from a primarily economic angle. The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place. The market supports overproduction, overpackaging and oversupply. All of those are economic activity that is marked in the "good" column by governments and societies.

Ultimately, lowering the production of a good used by people is a reduction in economic activity. Reduce, reuse, and recycle means less economic activity, but not less wealth. Until we realize this, we are destined to pursue policies that are bad for the environment and waste resources.

[kbenson]

It really depends on how long or short sighted the economic rational wants to be. If you include the cost of pollution, including people's desire to live without pollution and the cost to reduce it to acceptable levels for people, then economics encompasses everything needed to correctly assess a scenario (but whether we can correctly create and interpret the model is a much more dicey).

Edit:

> The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place.

Yes, costs of pollution were (are?) not being correctly applied to those creating the pollution. That's not a failure of economics, it's a failure of people to correctly account all the economic factors that exists.

[titzer]

I don't disagree with you(1), but time and again people have shown that their economic calculations have a time horizon well short of a single human lifespan.

(1) by a technicality; since complete environmental collapse and subsequent starvation could be "calculated" as a total loss for humanity. But no one does calculations in these terms; they do it in money.

[kbenson]

> time and again people have shown that their economic calculations have a time horizon well short of a single human lifespan.

I don't disagree with that either, but I think that has historically been largely due to our erroneous belief that we had a negligible effect on the world at most, which is thinking that is thankfully coming to and end. I don't doubt there was a time in the past where we believed we couldn't affect the ocean, and prior to that a river or the soil in an area. That isn't a good track record to hoping we understand it earlier next time (if our species is lucky, in some number of decades or centuries the discussion will be about our effects on the solar system, not our planet), but it does point towards eventually getting the idea and taking steps to fix the problem behavior, even if it's not always adhered to or a perfect solution.