"Now that the credit crunch and high food and commodity prices have come along and seem here to stay, David Cameron’s Conservatives, according to the British historian and commentator Max Hastings, would be wise to drop all their high-minded guff about the environment. In belt-tightening times there are other priorities. The signs are that Labour’s very modest increase in fuel tax and proposals to raise excise duty for the most polluting cars may fall victim to protests against tax rises which, presumably, no-one ever imagined would be popular.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the most dramatic presidential nomination campaign in living memory, the environment has barely figured at all. Hillary Clinton’s image as a tough pragmatist does not accord with any sort of greenery, and in Barack Obama’s glowing vision of a new politics and peace on earth, the environment is strangely absent. It is left to the elderly war veteran Republican candidate, John McCain, to be an unlikely upholder of ecological values.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, the environment minister Marina Silva has resigned, saying in her resignation letter to her friend President Lula that her efforts to protect the environment and in particular the Amazon rainforest had faced “growing resistance ... from important sectors of government and society”.

This, it seems to me, is in every sense antediluvian thinking and antediluvian politics. It is antediluvian in the sense of hopelessly antiquated and dated, but it is also more literally antediluvian, in the sense of being the kind of thinking and politics that precedes the Great Flood.

Starting with the antiquated and dated sense, these commentators and politicians seem stuck in the old and much-repeated groove that environmental politics represents a kind of luxury, something like a Gucci bag. This kind of accessory may make people feel good and can be flaunted in periods of affluence, but must be jettisoned as soon as any hard times appear.

What is lacking is any sense of connection – that at a deeper level, the economic hard times and the environmental degradation and over-exploitation are linked. To take one of the most famous environmental disasters of recent times, what advice would these commentators have given to the cod fishermen (and the politicians regulating the fisheries) of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in the 1960s and 1970s? Stock conservation might be a good idea if there was a lot of spare cash around, but in straitened circumstances give up on thought for the future and carry on with business as usual, hoovering up any and all cod that can be found using massive factory trawlers with sophisticated sonar and satellite equipment, with no regard for scientists’ warnings about unsustainability? Result: catastrophic and irreversible decline of one of the world’s richest fishing grounds, 30,000 jobs lost and whole communities devastated.

When politicians, under pressure to win votes and from powerful lobby groups, dilute environmental policies and regulation, I suppose the logic must be that they are leaving things to the market. But since early in the 20th century, enlightened economists, beginning with Pigou, have realised that environmental degradation represents a prime example of market failure. Markets on their own, for a variety of reasons, are incapable of dealing with many, perhaps most, environmental problems.

Take three kinds of environmental problem. First, common resources such as fisheries tend to be over-exploited in the absence of either social ownership or the limitation of harvest; stocks collapse suddenly, so price signals do not work.

Second, public goods such as air cannot be divided up in separate parts, which poses a problem for markets. Air pollution costs nothing to polluters, so without regulation there is an incentive to pollute. Third, future generations, who will be especially affected by environmental problems such as global warming, do not participate in markets. Market solutions to problems affecting the future tend to employ discounting – less value is placed on the future than the present. In the case of global warming, most cost-benefit analyses have advocated doing nothing.

Two years ago Sir Nicholas Stern published his review for the British government on the economic effects of climate change, which he called, in words that sound strong for an economist, “the greatest market failure ever seen”. But Stern’s main point was that this catastrophic market failure could be compounded, to an almost unimaginable degree, by the failure to act to redress it now. Suddenly it seemed as if economics, which had always taken the environment for granted and zero-costed its life-giving and pollution-absorbing capacities, had recognised the debt it owed, not least to Keats’s “moving waters at their priest-like task/ Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores”.

In the days before the Flood, the Book of Genesis recounts, “the earth was corrupt ... and full of violence”. The source of the corruption and violence was in the mind and heart of man: “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”.

God in his fury wanted to wipe His creation from the face of the earth; but one just man, in his ark, carrying the seeds of future life, was saved." (Harry Eyres, The Financial Times, June 7, 2008)