As Trevor Jackson (The men who sold the world, 20 February 2026) acknowledges, the externalities arising from economic activity can be both good and bad. He goes on to give an able rundown of the negative and, under the current US administration, worsening impacts on air quality of emissions from fossil fuels.
But there is, I think something missing from this analysis, and that is that it takes the number of people as a given. The fouling of our air (and water and much else) reduces the quality of our lives. But there are also the positive non-market positive externalities arising from employment, and the availability of heat, transport and other goods and services at low prices. These encourage and make possible the increased quantity of human life, which is surely the biggest impact of our complex, environmentally destructive societies.
As a species, we have collectively chosen to have 8 billion people alive today in relative affluence and facing environmental collapse, than the much smaller number – perhaps 1 billion – whose society could survive indefinitely in a world without production and consumption on today’s scale. Loosening of environmental rules will undoubtedly, as Mr Jackson says, worsen everyone’s air quality. But, by generating more economic activity, it will support a larger population. That’s essentially the choice that, with a few recent and token exceptions, every human society makes: we’d all prefer to be amongst the 1 billion who could live on a planet that’s forever pristine, but nobody would choose to be among the absent 7 billion.