Should the existance of any environmental costs outweight all possible economic benefits?

Question

Suppose that there are great economic benefits from transgenic crops, including improved nutrition, longer life spans, reduced infant morality, and the like. But also assume that there are some modest potential environmental costs, for example, in the form of some species that are made extinct.

Answer 1

It's a fine line that governments have been mulling over for years. We certainly must (and do) allow some business that may hurt the environment, but how we decide which businesses should be allowed and which ones shouldn't is a very controversial topic. In North America, the national park systems of the U.S. and Canada help preserve many wildlife areas, and if a species was that near to extinction, the government would take some preventive action, such as declaring that area a wildlife reserve, disallowing business in those areas, or relocating the plant/animal species elsewhere.

However, in cases without such drastic and immediate consequences, government economists have other programs to help discourage high-pollution industries (pollution is normally the biggest adverse effect business has on the environment). The most common gov’t programs involve either taxation or “pollution credits”.

Taxation: The government taxes a company based on each ton (or other unit) of pollution produced by that company annually. This makes the cost of business higher for high-pollution companies, and they respond by increasing prices (which will reduce the number of sales), finding cleaner and more-efficient ways to conduct business, or, if they can't or don’t make adjustments, going out of business.
Advantages – A fairly straightforward system, and one that increases government revenue (if you consider that a good thing)

“Pollution Credits”: The state or local government gives each company a certain number of "pollution credits", such as 500 tons pollution per year, and companies simply cannot produce more pollution than they have credits for. However, a company may buy these credits from another company that is not using all 500 of their credits. The price of these credits is based on the supply of and demand for them – a high-pollution market will have a greater demand and a lower supply (driving prices up and providing extra incentive for companies to reduce output), a low-pollution market will have a low demand and greater supply (so the cost of pollution isn’t very high). In the latter situation, the government can intervene by reducing the number of credits they issue, thereby reducing supply and increasing demand, driving the price of pollution up and increasing the benefits of not polluting.
Advantages – Keeps the money in the business sector, increasing the incentive for reducing pollution and increasing the costs of over-pollution. Instead of only reducing the costs they must pay (which is all the taxation program does), the low-pollution company not only avoids paying any taxes, but can also increase revenue by selling any pollution credits they do not need.

There are obviously a lot of subtleties and particulars that I haven’t addressed here, but under normal conditions (not dire extinction, but simply a reduction of wildlife) that’s how they take care of the environmental issues.

Answer 2

I, personally, don't think so. But try talking that way with a tree-hugger ☺


Doug

Answer 3

extintion is never"modest"
every blade of grass has as much right to life as you do!