Tragedies of Common Nonsense Related to Environmental Economics: A Note on Realism, Rationality, Reasonability and Responsibility

Abstract

Since the beginning of (historical) time, humans have been proving their adaptive, assertive and augmentative power over nature, yet there are (geological) forces that remind them of the old virtue of humbleness. Also, there is no doubt or denial that they can do harm themselves (and their descendants) by wasting resources and generating waste. Plundering and poisoning the environment / the climate come hand in hand with huge, yet unevenly distributed, advances in productivity and prosperity, but social scientists (such as economists or ethicists) are still wondering on and working at a sort of meta cost-benefit analysis: “is all this wealth creation worth the environmental price paid?” However, before entering convoluted utilitarian calculations, common sense informs us that institutions, with the incentives and information they provide, matter: people calculatedly misbehave when allowed to privatize their benefits and socialize their costs. Internalizing ecological losses/externalities (“prodigals and polluters must pay their fair share”) is the first impulse, only that, at a second glance, there is a great disparity between resorting to taxation or regulations, on the one hand, and to private property rights, contracts, and other free market mechanisms, on the other. These are opposite means for the very same ends. Legitimately, governments are perceived with mistrust for they have been (un)willingly (!?) tutoring national environmental disorders, tolerating biased/clumsy national environmental responsibilities, while seeking to forge global pacts, by simply “foreign-trading” public policies that epically failed at home. Even if without making considerations on the ultimate source of environmental disequilibria (from obvious overexploitation of certain resources to outright pollution and to decisive vs. just escalating climate change anthropogenic impact), economics can justifiably enter the environmental debates and disputes only to assess and address the never-ending “state (failure) vs. market (failure)” conundrum. For instance, in the case of current eco-concerns, it may revive Bastiat’s famous postulate: is the state’s climate-change-environmentalism that great fictitious idea by which everyone is indulged in seeking a… cooler life at the expense of everyone else?