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Making sure externalities are priced in is economic thinking.

Economic thinking: disposable consumer devices should have the cost of recycling and safe disposal priced in.

Ecological thinking: we shouldn't allow disposable consumer devices.



Economics simply fails to account for many ecological sourcing and disposal costs.

Hotelling's Rule (still taught despite no empirical support), the Rule of Capture, and law of unintended consequences are only three of the more glaring elements of this.

The dynamic Bernard J. Stern identified of established powers and agents seeking to retain, inflate, or at a minimum prevent devaluation of their assets or positions (this has no general name of which I'm aware) is another huge element. One mechanism of this does have a name: agnetology, a/k/a, manufactured ignorance or confusion, as expressed in the lead, asbestos, tobacco, alcohol, and fossil fuel industries, among others. See Proctor, Oreskes, and Conway, particularly in Merchants of Doubt.

Fully accounted petroleum would reflect a cost millions of times greater than present market prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_capture

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....




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