The basic argument of those who propounded the new orthodoxy, popularized for policymakers internationally in seminal texts such as 1989’s Blueprint for a Green Economy, was that the world’s growing environmental problems represented an endemic failure of capitalism’s price mechanism.19 Price is supposed to signal to consumers the full cost of producing a particular product, but, in the case of many of industrial societies’ most important products (say, cement), it did not. To be sure, some inputs – labour, capital, technology – were priced. But, alongside these priced inputs, were resources
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