ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some key concepts and results of the early stages of environmental and resource economics, which constitute the benchmark that will accompany us for much of the rest of the book. The problem we are looking at is twofold: the amount of polluting emissions caused by production and consumption, and the pressure put on renewable and non-renewable natural resources by the worldwide demand for inputs, raw materials, energy sources, services and consumption goods that has been steadily growing over the last 250 years, leading us to face now the prospect of leaving, as a bequest to future generations, a world which is deprived of resources and fatally polluted, instead of one in which an economy based on brown fossil fuels has been replaced by an equally (if not more) productive system based on green renewables.
