What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable. Worse still, many things that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence remain profitable, and, without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to produce them.

This — the market’s profit motive, not growth or industrial civilization — caused our climate calamity and the larger biocrisis.

It would be very useful to wind down our species’s combustion of fossil fuels, responsible as it is for roughly two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions. It would be useful, too, to increase input efficiency in agriculture, which, together with deforestation and land-use change, is responsible for most of the remaining third.