What is the problem in environmental protection?

Answer 1

A common belief is that economists don't care much about the environment because they are preoccupied with money, markets, and material wealth. And when economists do consider ways to protect the environment, they emphasize benefits and costs, trying to express all values in terms of cash.I think they treat Mother Nature as a whorehouse.

In truth, economists are just as concerned about environmental quality as most people, maybe more so. All sensible people value the quality of the natural environment, and would like to maintain and improve that quality. Also, economists have thought a lot more than most about the source of our environmental problems and have developed important insights into the best ways to solve them. Unfortunately, it is easy for non-economists to misunderstand the economic approach to protecting the environment, causing them to underestimate the effectiveness of that approach and the genuine environmental concern that economists have.

The typical reactions to pollution are to blame it on the greed of those who put profits ahead of protecting the environment and to have someone in authority stop it. The perspective of economists is different. They do not automatically conclude that pollution is always a problem that demands a solution. When they do conclude that pollution is a problem that should be addressed, they seldom suggest having government demand that the pollution be stopped altogether. Finally, economists see blaming pollution on self-interest as unproductive, if not downright silly.

Because of scarcity, attempting to eliminate all harm caused by pollution makes no sense. Sure, it would be nice to eliminate pollution, but reducing pollution always requires doing less of something else that is desirable, and long before we reduced pollution harm to zero, the marginal benefit would be less than the marginal cost. Of course, in many situations it is desirable to reduce pollution. While people may seldom agree on how much to reduce, they should agree that any reduction ought to be achieved as cheaply as possible-at the least possible sacrifice of value. But having a government agency command polluters to reduce pollution is the most costly way to protect the environment. And economists see no advantage in blaming self-interest for pollution because that leads to inefficient pollution reduction. Indeed, the cheapest way to reduce pollution is by taking advantage of self-interest.

Environmentalists want to protect and expand wetlands, which are the habitat for a wide variety of flora and fauna. They are also concerned about global warming, which is supposedly resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases. But wetlands are one of the biggest sources of methane, a major greenhouse gas. So a cost of expanding wetlands is the release of more greenhouse gas. Is this a cost environmentalists think we should ignore?

Environmentalists also want to save forestland and eliminate the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture. Preventing starvation in poor countries without using chemical pesticides and fertilizers would require clear-cutting millions of acres of trees for agricultural use. So fewer trees are one of the costs of reducing chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Finally, and more generally, since waste products have to go somewhere, one cost of reducing water pollution is an increase in either air pollution or waste-disposal sites.

These costs are the direct result of scarcity and require facing up to some tough questions. Is protecting wetlands more important than preventing global warming? Is protecting rivers, lakes, and oceans against the runoff of chemical fertilizer more important than maintaining our forests (which absorb carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas)? Which is more valuable, clean air or clean water? Environmentalists like to argue that environmental concerns are more important than anything else, but they can't argue that every environmental concern is more important than every other environmental concern.