Sustainability Thought 200: From linear pollution markets to circular pollution markets: Pointing out the third major blunder in terms of development thinking and critical socio-environmental problem solving

This author believes that there have been three clear major development thinking blunders since 1987 when trying to address the socio-environmental consequences of living under socio-environmentally distorted traditional market thinking since 1776 when the world endorsed and promoted Adam Smith’s ideas while the distortions embedded in that market creating the sustainability problem remain still active, one after the other: 1) First in 1987, the Brundtland Commission had a choice, to recommend a fix through sustainability market based solutions or to recommend a patch through sustainable development solutions to the critical socio-environmental problem they were dealing with; and they chose a patch; 2) In 2012 Rio + 20, the Brundtland Commission on Sustainable Development had a choice, to implement an environmental fix through green market-based solutions or to recommend a patch through dwarf green market-based solutions to the critical environmental problem they were addressing; and they chose a patch; and 3) In 2023 the world had again a choice, to finally internalize socio-environmental externalities to fix the pollution production problem in the linear traditional market and make it circular or to ignore the problem and move from traditional linear pollution production markets to traditional circular pollution production markets assuming again socio-environmental price distortion neutrality, and hence, leaving the root cause of the pollution generation problem embedded in both linear and circular pollution production markets untouched; and they chose to go circular economy thinking as a pretend patch. They are considered blunders because all those choices made since 1987 to address sustainability problems violate the theory-practice consistency principle and as well as the expectations of the Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm evolution loop under academic integrity. This paper focuses on the third development thinking blunder, the choosing of circular traditional pollution markets over linear traditional pollution production markets formally to since about 2023 mostly in Europe to address the critical socio-environmental problem they create without addressing the root-cause of the pollution production problem, the socially and environmentally distorted traditional market prices. In other words, the circular economy fixes the resource use inefficiencies of the linear economy instead of fixing the socio-environmental pollution problem associated with the linear model, the problem we have been trying to solve since 1987, and which is a problem still embedded in the traditional circular economy. The first and the second development thinking blunders have been recently highlighted in detail.