ABSTRACT
Many of the suggestions made in this book are not politically feasible in a market that leaves almost no role for the state. For 25 years, beginning in the early 1980s and culminating in the late 1990s, we have seen a phase of rejection of a strong state and of almost total belief in the powers of the markets. Liberalization, deregulation and privatization were the characterizing features of the era. State interventions met with utmost suspicion, and each and every environmental measure taken on national levels was in danger of being rejected as trade distorting by the World Trade Organization (WTO) or by the Commissioner for the Internal Market (in the EU). While it would be foolish to ignore the legitimate reasons lying behind the mindset of market dominance, we see equal legitimacy in maintaining that the state has an indispensable role to play in moving the economy from wasteful to efficient. The reason is simple, and now well known. Markets reflect production and distribution costs and customer's willingness to pay. They don't reflect long-term scarcities and environmental ‘externalities’. This failure, together with ever more efficient mining and transportation techniques, made resource prices decline over the last 200 years, as shown in Figure 9.1.
