by Frances Cairncross

About the author: Frances Cairncross is the environmental editor at the Economist, a weekly newsmagazine published in Britain.

Environmentalists tend to be alarmists. They have to be, to get their voices heard. The day-to-day traumas of politics and economics—a coup here, a currency crisis there—seize the attention of policymakers and elbow aside, week after week, the slower pace of environmental change. Besides, many environmental changes, especially in the rich world, appear to threaten neither health nor wealth. If the fish vanish from a river or the city air becomes hazier, the costs—in anything more than emotion—may be slight. In the rich world, many more people almost certainly die in traffic accidents than from the side-effects of pollution. Moreover, the recession of...