[ceejayoz]

> Instead of producing 2000 widgets, we produce only 1800 and fire one worker.

Do we?

As we're seeing with oil extraction, the actual thing we do seems to be "hire scientists, come up with new ways to extract, and start a brand new sector of the industry".

[quotemstr]

You're arguing the broken windows fallacy. Every economic inefficiency --- every forced deviation from what people would prefer to produce --- has a cost. Those scientists, if not working around misguided resource extraction bans, could have worked on something even more beneficial.

[ceejayoz]

> Every economic inefficiency --- every forced deviation from what people would prefer to produce --- has a cost.

It's not always that clear.

Replacing coal with solar was an economic inefficiency, until enough investment into solar happened. It's now cheaper to produce a MW/h via solar than via coal.

And that's before you factor in the pollution externalities.

We're all better off now because we did the temporarily inefficient thing via (in part) government intervention.