Sustainability economics: Where do we stand?

Environmental economics, which is a branch of resource economics - the environment as a scarce resource - is essentially about market failures, the costs of pollution and pollution abatement, and the economics of regulation. Sustainability economics includes the problem of maintaining economic growth, while reducing pollution and/or its impacts, with special attention to the linked problems of energy supply (not to mention the supply other exhaustible resources), climate change and - most urgently - fossil fuel consumption. There is a need for integration of resource and environmental economics under a new rubric, sustainability economics.