Modern economics is the problem, not the solution

The BBC reports that a review of the effects of climate change “is important because it looks at economic, not environmental, arguments”.

What’s interesting is that the BBC itself, through its correspondents, sub-editors and editors, is using language that supports the view that economics matters more than the environment.

It describes Sir Nicholas Stern’s review of the impact of global warming on economic output as “influential”, it heads the report “Global warming ‘threat to growth’”, and BBC business correspondent Hugh Pym says the report will carry weight because Sir Nicholas, a former World Bank economist, is seen as a neutral figure.

My Pym is reported as saying “unlike earlier reports, his conclusions are likely to be seen as objective and based on cold, hard economic fact”.

Since when is a leading economist and now economic advisor to the Britsh Government a neatural figure?

Why should an economist’s views been seen as more obkective and factual than those of environmentalists and climate control scientists?

And why hasn’t the BBC begun to engage with the idea that perhaps it’s not so much “climate change a threat to economic growth” as “economic growth a threat to the climate”?

The underlying problem is that modern economics requires growth year in, year out while the resources available to meet this growth are finite as is the world’s ability to cope with the impacts, byproducts and waste created by this growth.

The BBC could at least drop the adjectives that implies its support for economic theories over environmental ones, and be as questioning of economic “fact” as it is of environmental “fact”.