ABSTRACT
Environmental economics teaches that a proximate cause of environmental degradation is ‘excessive’ use of raw materials and energy relative to the availability of resources. The term ‘excessive’ has no meaning unless it is related to some norm of acceptability. Resources might be being used ‘excessively’ because the rate of use will give rise to the exhaustion of the resource in some time period deemed to be too short for society to adjust to. Or exhaustion may not be a concern for the current generation’s wellbeing, but is for the wellbeing of future generations. The resources in question may be materials (e.g. copper, bauxite, etc.) and energy (coal, oil, gas), or they may comprise the ‘sinks’ that receive waste from the economic system — e.g. the oceans, the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and so on. In the immediate post-second-world-war period and up to the early 1970s, there was concern that the world would ‘run out’ of certain materials and certain energy resources. It seems fair to say that few people express that concern now and certainly some of the dire predictions of ‘eco-catastrophe’ have not come true. This is for several reasons:
the ‘stock of resources’ is itself a variable concept: new reserves are found, lower grades of resources become usable as technology improves;
the ratio of materials and energy use to economic output tends to fall over time, i.e. we become more efficient in our use of resources;
‘new’ resources substitute for old ones, especially in the energy context where significant changes are occurring in the use of renewable energy technologies.
