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This is from a speech by Terry O Shaunessey in a debate with Miriam Kennet and Volker Heinemann at Oxford PPE Society November 2004

Issues to consider

Allocating scarse

Individual preferences

Collective choices

Immediate and longer term considerations

Allocation of consumption and investment decisions over time

Tragedy of the Commons a concept more fully explained in Garret Harding.

The carrying capacity and can be used to describe and predict behaviour..e.g examples of attempts to understand this can be the bowheaded whale extermination problem.

Equilibrium - how do you manage fish stocks for the best?

Green Economics says what are the economic motivators for people wanting to overfish and how we create a change of views so people want to preserve them?

Discounting the future- what is the value today and what is the value for future

Green Economics seeks to value future generations and not leave a mess for them to clean up both in terms of chemicals nad polliution and climate change for example. Envionrmental economics still reckons of future wishes and obligations being worth less than the present

Environmental economics asks : - How do we measure the benefit of having a rare species or a wilderness area.?Whati s the cost to us of loosing it because we might use it up ot build on it?

The Green Economic solution is to say we don't want to loose it- what is the economics of keeping it as well as the psycology of keeping it.How can we prevent its disapearance? what are the motivators for people wanting to remove it?HOw can we change that?

Carbon Trading

It strikes the Green Economics Institute that Environmental Economics can be applied to climate change- ie measuring the damage dome but it does not change or address the aims of the methodology-

The aim must surely be to change behaviour so that the particular problem ceases to happen - so for example carbon trading means that the US can buy pollution rights from everybody else and no one else has any carbon. This is not equity and is a receipe for resentment.

The solution according to Green Economics is to reduce total carbon consupltion by everybody but especially by the worst polluters. The result of this is the totally different solution to the one offered by environmental economics.

Miriam Kennet December 2004