Q.What is Noise?

Economic growth generates negative externalities — costs (like pollution) imposed on third parties and not reflected in market prices — causing markets left alone to over-produce polluting output relative to the social optimum. This shows up as air and water pollution, land degradation, deforestation and biodiversity loss, waste accumulation, and climate change. Natural resources are classified as renewable (forests, fisheries, groundwater — sustainable if used within their regeneration rate) or non-renewable/exhaustible (coal, petroleum, minerals — a fixed stock depleted with every unit used). Open-access or commonly-held resources are especially vulnerable to the 'Tragedy of the Commons', where each user's private incentive to extract more outweighs the shared, diffused cost of depletion, leading to over-exploitation. The 1972 'Limits to Growth' report first placed the question of whether exponential growth can continue indefinitely on the global …