Economist Debates: Sustainable development: on the implication of uninternalised economic externalities
The planetwide problems of climate change and damage to ecosystems that face humanity now are rather different from those solved by the green revolution, in that they are often the consequences either of uninternalised economic externalities or of the “tragedy of the commons”, in which a scramble for resources that nobody owns results in those resources being destroyed rather than sustained. But that very observation suggests that changes in the economic rules, if they can be negotiated in the way that the agreement on CFCs was, might deal with them.
