There's an article in todays Sunday Times about the Gov & Dieter Helm applying the concepts of the free market to conserving our environment.

It's utterly mental stuff. There's a small bit of logic in it - if you can quantify environment damage (the externality) in a cash price then you can offset it with something good.I,e, do a bad thing (chop down a forest - £2m) and offset it with good thing (plant a £2m forest).

To be clear - factoring externalities is a good thing - but putting a price on it and applying classical economics to it? This could never go wrong could it? Wiping out a species literally can't have a price on it - once it is gone it is gone. It's not like a house that costs £100k to build and if it falls down you build another and it also costs £100k.

Nor are these units exchangeable. It's literally magic fantasy land to use cash to compare the destruction of species with building a new less damaging power station.

I can see this all as a Adam Curtis doc in 30 years. "Environmentalists couldn't get their message heard by those in power so they decided to talk the language of economics. They thought they could offset the cost of frogs being wiped out by investing the same amount in renewable energy. But they were wrong and created a new trap."

I find it all utterly chilling stuff. The triumph of market thinking.

And what consequences? Once you put a price on environmental destruction you've created a way of shutting up all criticism. "Oh we've factored in the costs of this destruction and there's going to be a new wind farm."

It's worse than a sop to environmentalists - it's a system of destruction that hopes to be beyond criticism with the pseudo authority of the market.

I'd like you to read it but it's behind a the bloody paywall. I didn't pay - I'm on the 14 day free subscriptions via the Kindle.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/features/article1006494.ece

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