Austrians on the Environment

You need to dig a bit deeper into economics to understand that while it may appear that we are spending more on economic needs through taxation by government, the manipulative ability of a fiat currency allows it to be inflated and deflated at the whim of those who represent us, without the will or approval of the people. 

Since the Gold Standard was abandoned in the US, the dollar has devalued to about 4% of it's strength, during which time the wealth gap has increased to a point never before seen. I believe we still have potential to see environmental needs met, but only if we can prevent complete corruption by having a large portion of the population concerned and active in the ecology that sustains our lives. 

Austrian economics and free market theories always attract my attention for the way they deter corruption by preventing government from becoming so great that it consumes such a large portion of the spoils of labor. More from Mises;

Fundamentally, “sustainable development” is a notion of… disciplining our current consumption. This sense of “intergenerational responsibility” is a new political principle, a virtue that must now guide economic growth. The industrial world has already used so much of the planet’s ecological capital that the sustainability of the future is in doubt. That can’t continue.

The concepts of valuation, capital, and income only take on valid or coherent meaning in the context of individual action, private property and market exchange… The critical goal of legitimate sustainability is to establish an expanded system of private property rights that allows the owners to manage resources as capital assets. (p. 21)

…the ethics underlying the acquisition of private property is not even acknowledged in the economics of intergenerational sustainability. The entire resource base of the world’s society is implicitly under the control of some government making allocative decisions. (p. 22)

Without private property, monetary exchange, and capital accounting, no rational economics of asset maintenance could exist… The extent that individual business plans may conflict and be incapable of mutual success creates a barrier to aggregation or “macro-reckoning.” Hence, society or a government as its agent has no aggregated measure of capital for which it can legitimately presume to make decisions. (pp. 28,29)

…public control of resources in the name of “sustainability” is not only contradictory but also self-defeating. (p. 41)

Austrians on the Environment - Mises Economics Blog - Ludwig von Mises