Depletive Waste: An Intergenerational Externality

Pecuniary price measures the rate at which buyers can trade increments of one good for another in a market. But in nature’s energy conversions, such rates of exchange respond to the needs of the ecological community, not to supply-demand balances in some artificial market. In the basic physical processes which produce man’s fuel sources and determine the quality of his environment, nature’s constants rather than variable market conditions control output.