ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role economic and political decision making and policy play in perpetuating and remedying our contemporary environmental and climate change problems. The chapter examines economic markets, and environmental and ecological economics. It also examines politics and policy, the potential for structural change, and the global political economy. Humans have obvious needs for an incredible variety of goods and services that are all provided by the earth’s resources. Economicmarkets include the systems through which such goods and services are distributed that bring investors, producers, sellers, and buyers together. Environmental economists assume that if ecosystems and natural capital are assigned value and appropriately priced, they can be efficiently allocated. It is necessary to understand the powerful and pervasive ways that government interventions distort markets. Environmental economists suggest inverting the old system of taxes and subsidies to internalize the full costs of doing business and reassign them to the marketplace where they belong.
