ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 ‘Regimes to Contain Environmental Degradation’ covers the merits of mechanisms, such as tradable permits, fiscal intervention and regulations setting environmental standards. It also highlights the reasons why a rapid transition to climate sustainability may be unachievable under a marketoriented system of economic management. Avoiding climate catastrophe is likely to require a substantial degree of non-market methods of public direction of the economy. Chapter 10, ‘Cost-benefit Analysis’, examines the pitfalls of the application of the public expenditure evaluation technique known as costbenefit analysis to long-term environmental processes such as climate change. In our view, protection of the natural world and the survival prospects of future generations form an absolute requirement which falls outside the remit of economic calculation. Chapter 11, ‘Growth: Its Purpose, Measurement and Cost’ discusses the basic question whether continued economic growth is at all possible and/or advantageous, and what it is for. The authors’ position on this issue is that we live in a world of limited rationality. As far as the more affluent part of the world is concerned, a measure of economic growth is necessary in order to maintain employment rather than for its own sake, while the lessdeveloped countries need growth to achieve more than bare survival. The final chapter, ‘To Conclude’, fuses the threads spun in the individual chapters and suggests ways in which the present crises due to human activity may be mitigated. The chapter ends with two scenarios as to the possible future of the earth in, say, 2060, some 50 years from now.
