Noam Chomsky
Let's go to the environmental crisis. There's nobody around to bail you
out. The externalities in this case are the fate of the species. If
that's disregarded in the operations of the market system, there's
nobody around who is going to bail you out from that. So this is a
lethal externality. And the fact that it's proceeding with no
significant action being taken to do anything about it does suggest that
Ernst Mayr actually had a point. It seems that there is something about
us, our intelligence, which entails that we're capable of acting in
ways that are rational within a narrow framework but are irrational in
terms of other long-term goals, like do we care what kind of a world our
grandchildren will live in. And it's hard to see much in the way of
prospects for overcoming this right now, particularly in the United
States. We are the most powerful state in the world, and what we do is
vastly important. We have one of the worst records in this regard.
Noam Chomsky
