sustainability
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Economic giants like US, China have been buying up mining rights for minerals, rare earth metals to manufacture ‘renewable’ energy requiring batteries, turbines and solar panels; expropriating and siphoning natural wealth from the natural resource-rich income-poor South to the resource-poor income-rich North; cheapening earth’s resources by exploiting its monopsony (buying) power over South nations. The
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Carbon credits and tradable pollution permits are in effect markets for the right to pollute. Carbon markets purport to reduce emissions by setting a physical cap on the volume of emissions for a region e.g EU, divided into tradable permits and allocated to firms to be traded on a secondary market; in theory it incentivises
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Or in modern times ‘the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate’ The observation that increased energy efficiency, paradoxically, tends to lead to increased energy use and extraction of natural resources. In the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decline. The paradox is named after William Jevons
Elevate Economics 