Fuck Pop Economists

Picture a man standing high above the ground on a tree limb. This man has a saw in one hand and $5 in his pocket, and he's busily cutting away the wood beneath his feet. Someone passing by sees him and yells up, "Hey, what are you doing? Can't you see that you're going to fall?" To which the man replies, "Sure, but I got paid $5 to chop this limb off, and anyway, I'm not convinced that ground down there is as hard as it looks!"

This, it seems to me, is the perfect encapsulation of the economic argument against environmental protection. Any person who would attempt to justify environmental degradation because there is money to be made is not just a fool, but a sociopath.

It's also very likely that, markets and economies being what we might call "man-made," and the natural world being what we might call "not man-made," or "real," that putting economics before environment is exactly backwards; it seems like trying to pay a cyclone to change course, or hoping that, if you get rich enough, you can buy the ocean and fill it in with concrete and that'll fix that problem. Or not.

This guy, in fact, sums it all up nicely.