Conclusion It is impossible at the moment to argue that natural resources are scarce or likely to become so in the foreseeable future. As one economist put it to me, if you think of the economy as an 800-lb. gorilla in your apartment, we no longer worry so much about how hungry he is, it's more the other end of the gorilla that has us concerned. And yet in both other branches of environmental economics, renewable resources and pollution, there are cornucopian arguments as well.

Jack-up rigs in the gulf of Mexico.

By these arguments, most of the waste and pollution occurred as the technologies of extraction and consumption were new and inefficient. This point of vew would point out that US waters and air are becoming cleaner over time. Huge environmental disasters on the other hand were caused by decaying eastern European socialist systems (Simon, 1966), and exacerbated by their eventual collapse. This seems to suggest that government intervention is a bad thing, but it's important to remember that free markets did not produce the environmental cleanup that has occurred in the US and Europe since the 1970's, governments have coerced it through a variety of means. The most successful of these are the ones that seek to internalize the external costs to society of natural resource production and consumption.

A new means of attempting this implied by the concept of natural resource accounting which tries to put dollar values on such things as clean air, clean water and undisturbed wilderness, in order to make it possible for governments to keep track of the true costs associated with economic activity.

References