ABSTRACT
Blueprint for a Green Economy (Blueprint 1) argued that the source of most environmental problems lies in the failure of the economic system to take account of the valuable services which natural environments provide for people. One of the central messages of Blueprint 1 was that many environmental resources have no market. Environmental assets are important not just in themselves but in economic terms, that is in terms of the economic services they provide. One popular way of measuring the physical scarcity of natural resources is to compute the period of time before available resources are exhausted. Economic systems are generally good at providing only the first of these. While some commentators still express concern about the exhaustion of fossil fuel energy and mineral resources, the functioning of market systems can, to a considerable extent, be relied upon to signal when these resources are approaching exhaustion.
