As a tool for making decisions about long-term environmental policy, environmental economics does not work on its own terms. It works well as a tool for analyzing environmental policy given clear, exogenously defined costs and benefits. As such, environmental economics can work well as a tool for analyzing policy in the short term. But many of the most salient issues in international environmental politics are salient specifically because they have a fundamental long-term component. Economic tools have trouble pricing environmental goods, and the farther the cost element of cost/benefit analysis is projected into the future, particularly through the analytical tool of the discount rate, the less reliable estimates are likely to be. At a certain point, the compounding of this decreasing reliability makes the cost estimates analytically counterproductive. As such, this paper concludes that fundamental decisions about the relationship between economic activity and the natural environment in the long term need to be informed by ecocentric rather than economic thinking.

Scholars and activists are concerned, sometimes simultaneously, with mitigation of anthropogenic climate change and the environmental effects of globalization. Many analysts argue that a solution to both problems is localization; increasing the costs of transportation should increase the cost of long-distance transportation, making local and regional exchange economically relatively more efficient. The argument here, however, is that dealing with climate change will have the effect of reinforcing patterns of economic globalization, at the expense of patterns of economic nationalization and continentalization. Transportation by sea has historically been, and continues to be, more fuel-efficient than transportation by land. Limiting anthropogenic carbon emissions in transportation therefore favors sea transport over land transport. Historically, patterns of trade favored global seaborne trade routes over trade within land-based regions. The model to look in understanding the effect of action on climate change on global trade pattens, therefore, is not the future proposed by the localists, it is at historical patterns.

The sea turtle has become an icon ofenvironmentalist opposition to the World Trade Organization. Two decisions by the WTO in 1998 against a United States law intended to force other countries to adopt more turtle-friendly rules attracted widespread attention. A third decision in 2001 which supported the US law, however, went almost entirely unnoticed. A closer examination ofthe three decisions suggests that the WTO willingly accepts the idea ofenvironmental restrictions to international trade applied unilaterally by countries. But it requires that the restrictions be fairly applied and nondiscriminatory, show signs of being effective, and be accompanied by efforts to deal with the environmental issue cooperatively. These are all requirements that environmentalists should find unobjectionable. As such, the cause of more effective international environmental management might better be served ifenvironmental activists and NGOs worked with the WTO rather than reacting automatically against it.

Recent efforts to conserve fisheries stocks have included such demand-side measures as consumer boycotts to reduce demand for specific species, and the promotion of aquaculture to reduce pressure on natural stocks. This article argues that these sorts of measures can be counter-productive. The economics of the commercial fishing industry are such that decreasing demand for particular species can often have the perverse effect of increasing industry effort to catch them. This means that consumer boycotts or efforts to promote aquaculture can have the effect of accelerating, rather than ameliorating, the depletion of overfished stocks. This proposition is tested on a panel data set, covering several species over a period of almost two decades, drawn from the New England fishery. We conclude that effective conservation of depleted fisheries requires supply-side regulation such as quotas.