[noizejoy]

And that disconnect between economics and what’s environmentally manageable is at the very heart of a lot of modern problems.

I often wonder, if there will ever be a way to make that widening chasm disappear, other than going back to living in caves …

[mikepurvis]

The manufacture, storage, and ultimate disposal of all those spare parts also has an environmental cost, unless you assume that the measures end up driving some industry wide shifts, such as toward many more common parts, on-demand manufacture of certain elements, etc. It's a lot easier to warehouse a bunch of STL files than the actual bits, and maybe if your dishwasher's controller unit is just a 3v3 Linux computer with a standard GPIO connector, then a "spare part" in ten years is a totally different unit that happens to plug in and run the same interpreted software, and everything on the other end of that connector is just standard discrete parts like drivers, signal conditioning, etc, that can be replaced a la carte.

In any case, there certainly have been some proposals for how to bring some of these costs into the economic picture, most obviously pricing carbon and charging upfront disposal taxes for things like automobile tires. More aggressive measures might specifically punish the extraction of anything non-renewable— John Michael Greer talks a bunch about this [1] in a framework where the "primary economy" is in fact the natural processes like rain, pollination by insects, fertilization by animal waste, etc. Anything humans do on top of that which disrupts it is "secondary economy" and should have to pay the appropriate compensations for stewardship.

It sounds reasonable, but obviously it's a political nonstarter in any place in the world (like Canada) whose economy is mostly still built on conventional primary industries like oil, logging, fishing, mining.

[1]: https://newsociety.com/books/w/the-wealth-of-nature