GP mentions that "a river that a factory uses as a dumping ground until the waters are toxic and everything in it dies is exactly an example of a resource treated as limitless." In your opinion, is the market properly functioning to correct these behaviors? Where is the market when all the world's trash are getting dumped in our rivers and oceans?
That's an untaxed externality, which is one of the many things that markets do not handle well. There are others.
Here's the difference: the river is not being treated as an unlimited resource, it's being treated as a free resource. Nobody genuinely thinks the river can dilute unlimited toxic waste, but someone does genuinely think they won't be held accountable for killing the fish. In contrast, nobody in the oil business could expect to "get away with" ignoring peak oil, because they could not expect their customers to buy products that they were unable to produce from oil that did not exist.
Markets do not address global warming, but markets do address "peak oil," and the staggeringly bad suggestions that get passed off as wisdom every time people start talking about "peak oil" type problems remind me why we put up with markets in the first place.
