I hate to say I told you so, and could be too dead to do so, so I'll tell you in advance: One decade soon, environmental problems will stop tracking with GDP. But the reasons? Well, they probably aren't what you think, especially if you've been drinking the green Kool-Aid. For decades, big-picture ecologists and eventually the "ecological economists" pointed out the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Every tick of GDP came with the tock of habitat loss, pollution, and, as we gradually realized, climate change. A growing GDP requires a growing human population or a growing amount of goods and services per person. In the American experience of the 20th...
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