Soru

Read the following passage.

While classical economic models traditionally viewed environmental damage as an "external" cost to be managed through market pricing mechanisms, the discipline of ecological economics posits a fundamental paradigm shift. Neoclassical environmental economists maintain that natural capital and human-made capital are essentially interchangeable. From their perspective, the depletion of natural resources is not inherently problematic so long as the revenue generated is invested in producing equivalent human-made capital—a concept known as "weak sustainability." Therefore, they advocate for market-based solutions, such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems, assuming that proper pricing will spur technological innovations capable of substituting for lost ecosystems.

Ecological economists, by contrast, argue for "strong sustainability." They contend that critical natural capital—such as the ozone layer, biodiversity, and global climate regulation—provides life-support functions that cannot be replicated or replaced by human technology. For ecological economists, the economic system is entirely a subsystem of the broader biosphere, rather than a parallel entity that occasionally interacts with the environment. Consequently, they view the reliance on pricing mechanisms as fundamentally flawed, because market prices cannot capture the absolute limits of ecological thresholds. Instead of merely correcting market failures, they advocate for strict biophysical constraints on economic scale and throughput, arguing that perpetual economic growth on a finite planet is a physical impossibility.

Based on the passage, neoclassical environmental economists would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements concerning technological innovation?