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

This author believes that there have been three clear major development thinkingblunders since 1987 when trying to address the socio-environmental consequences of livingunder socio-environmentally distorted traditional market thinking since 1776 when the worldendorsed and promoted Adam Smith’s ideas while the distortions embedded in that marketcreating the sustainability problem remain still active, one after the other: 1) First in 1987, theBrundtland Commission had a choice, to recommend a fix through sustainability market basedsolutions or to recommend a patch through sustainable development solutions to the criticalsocio-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 anenvironmental fix through green market-based solutions or to recommend a patch through dwarfgreen market-based solutions to the critical environmental problem they were addressing; andthey chose a patch; and 3) In 2023 the world had again a choice, to finally internalize socioenvironmental externalities to fix the pollution production problem in the linear traditionalmarket and make it circular or to ignore the problem and move from traditional linear pollutionproduction markets to traditional circular pollution production markets assuming again socioenvironmental price distortion neutrality, and hence, leaving the root cause of the pollutiongeneration problem embedded in both linear and circular pollution production marketsuntouched; and they chose to go circular economy thinking as a pretend patch. They areconsidered blunders because all those choices made since 1987 to address sustainabilityproblems violate the theory-practice consistency principle and as well as the expectations of theThomas Kuhn’s paradigm evolution loop under academic integrity. This paper focuses on thethird development thinking blunder, the choosing of circular traditional pollution markets overlinear traditional pollution production markets formally to since about 2023 mostly in Europe toaddress the critical socio-environmental problem they create without addressing the root-cause ofthe pollution production problem, the socially and environmentally distorted traditional marketprices. In other words, the circular economy fixes the resource use inefficiencies of the lineareconomy instead of fixing the socio-environmental pollution problem associated with the linearmodel, the problem we have been trying to solve since 1987, and which is a problem stillembedded in the traditional circular economy. The first and the second development thinkingblunders have been recently highlighted in detail.