Today I learnt about what is important about student governing bodies like CSU and ASFA, I learnt about environmental economics, and I am going to learn about the Concordia Sustainability Policy tonight.
My learning about environmental economics has come in equally from my Microeconomics class and my Human Environment class. My econ teacher, Moshe Lander, regularly voices his opinions in support of the free unregulated market as the most efficient and just allocator of resources from those who value them least to those who value them most. I feel very privileged to be able to sit and listen to him speak from a place of privilege about how great the system that privileges him is. Honestly, though. He used to be senior economic adviser to Ralph Klein and the perspective he brings to my life as somebody who wants to learn about the world is just invaluable. He regularly comes out with quotes (which you can search for in vain in the course text, "Introduction to Microeconomics") which blow my mind and which I have never been able to hear anywhere else.
For today I'm going to focus on one particular quote which connected well, as many of his do, with a concept I learnt about in a class called "Human Environment" in the Geography department at Concordia. Its main focus is on human impact on the physical environment, as you could probably guess. I often find counterparts to economic concepts here.
Professor Lander said "Everything has a dollar value. The sooner you accept that, the better."
My Human Environment textbook gave me some very helpful context for this somewhat perplexing statement. I'm going to paraphrase because that will help me learn better, and I'm mostly prioritising that pursuit for this blog.
Environmental economists are concerned with putting a price on natural resources because 1) this is the language that government bodies, banks and investors speak in, and so it's easier to offer an assessment of environmental destruction and degradation that's quantifiable. This could be as an "Externality" that must be internalised in the cost of production of a good. If the environmental cost of a plastic bag has been priced at 5$, then the cost of that plastic bag cannot be called "5 cents" anymore. That's a lot to swallow if you're a plastic bag producer, but it's that kind of thing that environmental economists seem to want to put across- environmental destruction, more than just being a problem for other species or other humans in the environment you're destroying, is more expensive than you can afford.
I'll write more later:
notes: explain the problems with environmental economics,
dark chocolate,
and write about the other two things I learnt today.
Expand this blog by writing an article about the music I'm making.
Thanks.
