Economic development or protecting the natural world?

Nowadays there is a big debate about whether governments should focus on economic development or on protecting the environment. Both opinions have their supporters and in this essay I will discuss both of them.

Firstly, many people believe that economic growth should be the main priority of a government. The reason is that a strong economy creates jobs for the population and gives the state more money, which can be spent on hospitals, schools and roads. This is especially true in developing countries, where a large number of citizens still live in poverty and their main concern is to feed their families. For these people, environmental problems seem less urgent than unemployment.

Secondly, other people argue that protecting the natural world is more important. They point out that pollution causes serious health problems such as asthma and lung cancer, and that climate change is already leading to floods and droughts in many regions, which in the long term will cost the government far more money than it saves today. Furthermore, once a forest is cut down or a species becomes extinct, it is impossible to bring it back, while an economic crisis is only temporary.

In my opinion, both goals are necessary for a country and governments should try to find a balance between them. If they focus only on money, the environment will be destroyed, and if they focus only on nature, people will be poor. Therefore a balance is needed and this is the responsibility of every government.

Governments are routinely asked to choose between prosperity and the natural world, and the framing itself is part of the problem. My view is that environmental protection should be treated as a constraint on growth rather than a competitor to it — a position that concedes a great deal to the growth-first camp before parting company with it.

Advocates of growth-first policy make a serious argument, and it is not greed. Public health systems, schools and pensions are funded out of tax receipts, and tax receipts come from economic activity; a state that stalls its economy loses the capacity to protect anyone, including from environmental harm. In low-income countries this is acute. It is difficult to justify blocking a factory to a household whose alternative is subsistence farming, and policies that do so without offering anything in its place tend to be reversed at the first election.

The opposing case rests not on sentiment but on dependency. Every economy is a subsidiary of its resource base: fisheries that collapse do not recover on a political timetable, aquifers drawn down faster than they refill impose a bill on agriculture decades later, and air quality determines how many working days a labour force actually has. Growth financed by depleting these assets is not growth so much as borrowing from the same balance sheet it claims to be filling.

What follows is not a vague balance but a specific one: price the damage. Sweden has taxed carbon since 1991 and its economy has roughly doubled since, which suggests the trade-off is far softer than the debate assumes. Governments should pursue growth aggressively, and make it pay for what it costs.