From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

“The environment has to be balanced against the economy.” This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolvd to be a money-saving device.  This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well.