ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the industries that spew carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere and from political scientists who talk about the failure of regulatory regimes. A tropical ecologist is likely to give you a lecture about deforestation and the burning of Amazonia. The ocean is an almost inexhaustible supply of gold and other valuable minerals, but the cost of recovering them is very high. The irony is that renewable resources like timber and fish are the ones most in danger of being destroyed by human over exploitation. The most immediate ecological dangers of pollution, extinction, and climate change are due more to waste, poor regulation, and unregulated emission than to the using up of resources. Since then, sociologists, social psychologists, and ecological economists have taken the lead in thinking about the problems of high consumption in North America.
