| > Well, you can repair the damage from plastic bags. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you can, but the costs to the environment involved in doing so are prohibitive. In any case, I don't think it's totally obvious that this is actually possible ATM. > If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory Yeah, well, reality > model. Unless we colonize space, destroying earth = infinity. So the implication of your statement is that pricing is a bad model for certain types of environmental damage. However... > would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags. ...the realistic impact of most types of irreversible environmental damage has no known bound, but is not infinite. Difficult-to-bound unknowns also make it impossible to quantify damages a priori at the level of detail necessary for pricing. Again, reality > model, so accurate pricing is a bad mechanism. I think there are reasonable arguments against plastic bag bans. But trying base policy on an accurate accounting of the cost of long-term or irreversible environmental damage is a fool's errand in many cases. (Also, note that my point is that in general, pricing environmental externalities is weird. Plastic bags aren't even nearly the best example of this, but are illustrative of the most common solution -- don't price, disincentivize.) |
That doesn't sound like it justifies any one tradeoff over another, nor tell us how we should decide to.