It really depends on how long or short sighted the economic rational wants to be.  If you include the cost of pollution, including people&#x27;s desire to live without pollution and the cost to reduce it to acceptable levels for people, then economics encompasses everything needed to correctly assess a scenario (but whether <i>we</i> can correctly create and interpret the model is a much more dicey).<p>Edit:<p>&gt; The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place.<p>Yes, costs of pollution were (are?) not being correctly applied to those creating the pollution.  That&#x27;s not a failure of economics, it&#x27;s a failure of people to correctly account all the economic factors that exists.