[milesvp]

I’ll take you one further. It’s generally understood in economics that the more expensive item generally has higher environmental costs. Which has implications that you can’t really spend your way to a cleaner future. It is a dismal science.

[throwaway22032]

I agree with the first part of what you're saying to an extent - it makes sense that higher monetary cost items have higher costs in general - that's pretty much just describing scarcity.

I don't think your second statement logically follows though, because environmentally damaging costs are not all equal.

As a thought experiment, being able to extract a bunch of X mineral from a 500 mile deep quarry might be both extremely expensive and extremely environmentally damaging in that localised area, but if the mineral can be used to generate a bunch of clean energy or capture carbon or whatever, then in net it can work.

[milesvp]

Oh, sure. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I completely agree with the implication that you can't spend your way out to a cleaner future. I mean, you could certainly spend a lot of money today to avoid spending money in the future, which is a category that your example of clean energy could fall into.

I was being slightly tongue in cheek, but what's a little depressing, is that when I look at analysis of things like carbon sequestering, it's really hard to end up carbon positive when factoring everything in. These kinds of things tend to then add credence to the idea that you can't spend your way to a cleaner future.