That's very true. It may very well have a net positive economical effect.
But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true.
Economic advantages are not all there is to look after, long term effects are important, and the absolute effect on economies is also important. In other words if our economy goes up because of doing something and some poor country loses all they've got then you could argue the net effect is positive because they didn't have much to begin with.
But that's definitely not how the world should work.
So we need to look past purely economic motives and at humanity (and to some extent the biosphere) as a whole.
>"But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true."
I doubt that any serious environmental economist thinks this way. Economists do include non-monetary factors in cost/benefit analsyes, and the cost of environmental degradation which does NOT show up on profit/loss statements is one of the oldest topics in the field.
Dismissing the entire discipline of environmental economics as the work of "bean counters" is a really bad rhetorical start for any serious discussion of ecological policy, though unfortunately it happens often among the masses on internet message boards. I am really disappointed to see that these caricatures abound.
There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives, our stewardship of the planet could be much better, I doubt it could be much worse.
In less than 300 years, basically since the time that we started to industrialize we have remade face of the planet.
Point me to all those efforts at sustained management that ought to be a counterexample to those examples of wanton destruction of habitats and ecosystems for profit.
Everywhere that money is brought in to the equation sooner or later the ecology will have to suffer. Running an ecology as a business is simply not an option.
I know it has been tried many times and I know that there are plenty of people that probably have the best interest of their environment at heart, but from what I've seen to date the best thing we have done is to simply not mess with a large enough area and hope that it will recover.
Any attempt at large scale intervention, even from a positive viewpoint has sooner or later become a game of seeing how to use that resource within the letter of the law for maximum profit.
Rainforests, the Canadian forest management, wildlife preserves, the artic and the oceans.
The list really is endless.
Calling the people in charge bean counters is doing them a service, it means they're not actively involved in destruction on a planetwide scale that they are aware of.
I even leave open room for 'best intentions', but that doesn't mean their effects are positve. Not by a long shot.
Right now those places that are doing best in terms of species diversity and other parameters indicating relatively healthy ecosystems are those that we haven't gotten around to yet and those that we have utterly abandoned.
Environmental economics is a complete contradiction, you can not manage a tract of rainforest or a volume of ocean in a way that is at the same time good for the environment and ecologically sound.
We have basically taken out an environmental mortgage and have spent that mortgage on stuff that harms the environment, it will be a long long time before we are in a position to pay it back.
I realize this is not a happy picture, but sometimes it is better to open your eyes to what's really going on than to put on your rosy sunglasses and to hope that it will all go away.
There are lots of very uncomfortable conclusions that we may one day have to draw, there is a small chance that we will be in a position to guide those decisions if we start acting long enough in advance.
You are right that people have damaged the environment for personal gain in the past, but I still think that you are missing the point on what economics is about. In environmental economics researchers study why people use resources the way they do, how to design environmental regulation so that people will actually stick to it, and what resource use is likely to be in the future. "How to rape the environment more efficiently" is not a common topic of study.
Sorry, environmental economics was probably the wrong field to bring up. What we really want to know is whether or not these macroeconomic modelers take into account the value of ecological resources in their models. Tell you what, I'll scribble off a note to William Nordhaus and ask him. In my experience most academic economists have been very approachable.
Here's my letter:
"
Hello Dr. Nordhaus,
I have a question about the economic modeling of climate change. Do economists take into account the cost of ecological damage in their models?
I ask because this question came up in conversation a few days ago. A friend of mine claimed economic models were invalid because they only took into effect the monetary profit-and-loss effects of climate change and not the value of nature itself, but I wasn't sure if that was true. How does a resource like the Brazilian Rainforest enter into the model?
"The answer is that these are included conceptually in serious studies. The problem is that measurement has proven extremely difficult, so it is hard to judge whether the actual magnitudes are correct. WN"
I think it makes the case that economists do not consider ecological damage to be cost zero. However, it is hard to assign a hard objective value to it.
But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true.
Economic advantages are not all there is to look after, long term effects are important, and the absolute effect on economies is also important. In other words if our economy goes up because of doing something and some poor country loses all they've got then you could argue the net effect is positive because they didn't have much to begin with.
But that's definitely not how the world should work.
So we need to look past purely economic motives and at humanity (and to some extent the biosphere) as a whole.
Beancounters are bad stewards of ecologies.