Monthly Archives: February 2013

Redefining Growth

I thought maybe I coined a new word recently: physophilia, meaning love of growth. It describes the — at times irrational – preoccupation with and addiction to economic growth that possesses politicians and many economists.

This misplaced attachment has already been the focus of several EcoOptimism posts, especially here and here. (While we’re not physophiles, I guess you’d have to say we have a love of the topic itself.) The essence of the problem is that economic growth, at least as it is usually defined, is not the great objective most of us think it is. It is neither advisable nor desirable.  Yet it remains an assumed good.

In a post at one of my favorite blogs (you know you’re an eco geek when you regularly read posts from a site called the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy), Brian Czech dives into this, noting that President Obama, as well as almost-President Gore, try to sell the idea that we can simultaneously address environmental issues and grow the economy. In his recent State of the Union address, the president said: “Now, the good news is, we can make meaningful progress on this issue [climate change] while driving strong economic growth.”

At first blush, this sounds like a strong and positive pronouncement, a “Yes, We Can” for environmentalism. But there’s that intractable little problem (as we’ve previously discussed – see the links at the top) of living on a finite planet, a place where infinite economic growth – especially one based on materialism – is a physical, mathematical impossibility. That’s the reason Czech calls the president’s declaration a “slippery slope” in which he “capitulate[s] to paltry cynicism” in not acknowledging the linkage between economic growth and pollution.

So growth is bad, right? That depends on what we mean by the word “growth.” And this isn’t a Bill Clinton “it depends on what the meaning of is is” hairsplitting moment. Economic growth is usually taken to mean an increase in the popular indicator, Gross Domestic Product. The problem, as so many have noted, is that GDP is a crappy measure of well-being. It’s entirely possible to have strong GDP “growth” while people are becoming worse off, which in fact is what’s happened in much of the developed world (and parts of the developing world as well) over the past few decades.

In short, economic growth – at least in its GDP definition – is neither sustainable nor desirable, even if we didn’t have environmental issues to deal with. Fortunately, economic growth is not really what we want. Economic growth is not the same as improved quality of life, and sometimes it’s the opposite, for instance if it means longer work hours or harsher conditions, or if it feeds off the “hedonic treadmill” in which we constantly have to work more to buy more.

Czech asks if we have to get the president off this slippery slope of promoting economic growth alongside environmentalism, and concludes that, no, “he’s too far into it.” That conclusion, though, makes the assumption that Obama can’t use his bully pulpit to educate and inform. Yeah, I know he hasn’t been great at that to date, but here’s my proposal:  instead of sending the misleading and incorrect message that “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment,” change the emphasis to address what we really want by saying “there is no conflict between improving the quality of our lives and protecting the environment.”

‘Growing the economy’ is an abstract goal that’s mostly irrelevant to living better lives. Many economists and environmentalists know this; the U.S. data have indicated as much since the middle of the last century. But the public, by and large, doesn’t realize this because of the fixation that politicians and the news media have on reporting GDP and other markers like the stock market. (A secondary proposal: can we please get the news media to stop putting GDP front and center?)

That word I thought I had coined – physophilia – well, it turns out that Juliet Schor and others were there first. There goes my shot at a wordsmith credit. Merely getting rid of physophilia, though a necessary prerequisite, will not solve everything. Much of our current economy is based on a presumption of growth; how else can investment be encouraged and debt be retired? There are, in fact, other economic models – truly sustainable ones, unlike what we have – such as the world described in Enough Is Enough. (See my review here.) But as I’ve mentioned (ad nauseum, or so it seems at times to me), it’s a communication issue. How do we eschew something as seemingly positive sounding as growth? It will take a convincing group of voices, with resounding sound bites, to change the goal from wins for the economy to wins for people. Czech sounds as if he’s given up on Obama taking the lead in this. “He’s uttered the win-win rhetoric one too many times; now he’d have to admit his mistake in addition to explaining the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection.”

The EcoOptimist in me isn’t ready to do write Obama off just yet. In one sense, Czech is right: no politician wants to admit a mistake. But Obama doesn’t have to. He can instead redefine – in populist terms – what the goal really should be. It’s not the economy that we want to win; it’s us. It’s human growth, not economic growth.

Community and Sustainability

Far too many environmental conferences and discussions are repetitive and uninspiring. Frequently, we find ourselves preaching to the choir, perhaps just trying to impress each other. Then, every once in a while, an event manages to bring together the right “vibes,” and that’s when ideas can coalesce and energize.

I found myself in one of those happy circumstances this past weekend at “Understanding Urban Sustainability: One Block at a Time,” hosted by the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design (CUISD) and the Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc).

The Fourth Street Arts Block is within shouting distance (trucks, buses and horns notwithstanding) of Cooper Union. The block is home to several Off-Broadway theaters (among other productions, “Rent” began there) as well as typical NYC tenements, many with residents whose families have lived there for generations. It’s also adjacent to the Bowery, which is undergoing a Renaissance – probably its first ever – with hotels and museums replacing flophouses and used restaurant supply stores.

The block is the only official “cultural district” in NYC, but what interested me is that FABnyc has also embarked on a mission to green the block. To that end, they have a project with Cooper Union “to generate new and innovative solutions to the complexities of urban sustainability.” In addition, their “Model Block” program has undertaken energy efficiency steps such as enabling buildings on the block to install white roofs and obtain energy audits.

At the event, the questions revolved around what else FABnyc could be doing and how it might be looked at as a model for other blocks. As the discussions evolved, several topics I’d been pondering began to come together. In my recent columns (here, here and here) on the Lower East Side redevelopment project called SPURA, I spent a fair amount of time discussing neighborhood and street vitality, focusing on how monolithic buildings and big box stores sap energy compared to the way older “Main Street” type designs work.

This is not news, of course. The realization has been around since Jane Jacobs wrote about it and, in more recent years, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have concentrated on it as has Kaid Benfield (though his recent posts have lamented that Main Street’s future may not be all it’s cracked up to be).

Fourth Street’s architecture is pretty intact in that the buildings are walk-ups and most have storefronts on their ground level. So there is a constant level of activity and interaction involving residents, shop owners, dog walkers, theater attendees and others. The stores range from a small scale food co-op that’s been there for decades to a newcomer artisanal chocolate shop (highly recommended!). When the street is closed for a festival, it’s not the typical characterless affair that abounds in NYC summers with sock vendors and greasy food, but instead has performances, local artists selling jewelry and classes to teach kids to ride bicycles.

FAB_1sm

FAB_2sm

FAB! Festival photos by Lori Greenberg

What’s the connection to sustainability? One of the biggest issues in sustainability is disengagement. Many, if not most, people feel that any efforts they might be able to undertake are too difficult or, more commonly, too insignificant to matter. Living (or working) on a block or in a neighborhood where anonymity is the rule discourages any sense of ownership, of belonging to something larger than just you. Simultaneously, this means you have less incentive to participate and less sense of responsibility to a community. This can contribute to any number of “quality of life” problems like noise and littering. If you don’t know your neighbors, you’re less likely to care.

The digital world has exacerbated this problem. Several conference attendees commented that their blocks and communities became closer during the post-Sandy blackout because people were forced to leave their computers, X-boxes and televisions. People who lived across the street from each other or even next door met for the first time. This phenomenon resulted in some mostly tongue-in-cheek suggestions that we have regular planned blackouts. (It’s worth noting, though, that the Internet and email can also support block associations and bulletin boards and the like.)

It’s fairly apparent that a key to sustainability is popular support and participation – buy-in, some call it. Active street life can foster this in ways that high-rise apartment buildings, even when built to the street line, and towers-in-the-park cannot. For instance, one of my suggestions for future projects was a block collection system for compost. NYC currently does not have compost collection (though they’re looking into it). In the meanwhile, residents have to store their compost at home (keep in mind that most of us do not have outdoor space) and then take it themselves to a collection center on appointed days. That’s too much work and too much icky-ness for most. But if communities were to set up local, perhaps self-run systems, my bet is many more would participate – even without the “stick” of government requirements – and we might even see friendly competition to see whose building composts and recycles the most.

(There’s a question of critical mass here, too. How much density is needed to achieve the activity and street vitality that supports community involvement? And while it’s pretty obvious there’s a minimum density, is there a maximum? It’s a topic worthy of a post of its own, which is what I will do soon.)

At the end of the event, I brought up that this was an almost perfect application of the old environmental slogan “Think Global, Act Local.” Strengthening communities can get people out of their individual shells and lead to more involvement in and buy-in of local eco practices, which in turn can get people thinking on the larger global level since the world is, after all, just a much larger community.

ThinkGloballyActLocally

iRobot (No, not that one)

A new Wrongest Product Award nominee

I’m a fan of robots – miniature or otherwise – as much as the next eco geek raised on science fiction (interspersed with a suitable amount of actual science). Though I haven’t bought a Roomba (our dog does a pretty good imitation of one, at least as far as edible dirt is concerned), I do show photos of a robotic lawnmower, solar powered of course, in some of my ecodesign classes. And I can sort of see the value in a silicon-based life form that cleans the crud off barbeque grills.

But this one, a small robotic cleaner for smartphones and tablets, nominated by EcoOptimist reader Wouter Ulburghs, defies any attempt at justification. While I’m intrigued by the idea of robot window cleaners for tall buildings and nanobots that eat dust (so long as they can differentiate dead skin from live and don’t lead to “gray goo” apocalypse), it’s not exactly a burden, as Ulburghs notes, to wipe the schmutz off your iPhone screen.

robot tablet cleaner

And while we’re at this, let’s take a moment to note how many of the Wrongest Product Award nominees originate from Japan, land of the Unuseless inventions.

 

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

The Keystone XL Pipeline No-brainer

Consider this my atonement for not making it to the anti-Keystone XL pipeline protest in Washington this past Sunday. My self-serving defense was a conveniently scheduled family get together. (And how often are family events conveniently scheduled?) My admiration and thanks go to the 40,000 or so who braved the biting cold.

Excuses aside, I was there in mind if not body. The pipeline and the tar sands production it would help enable are just a thoroughly bad idea. They make no sense from any perspective, except perhaps for the few people (and I guess corporations now get included in that category) who would profit from them. Many have written about this, but I think a summarized categorical break down is worthwhile.

Energy

Like all post-peak fossil fuels, the tar sands have a diminishing EROEI or Energy Return On Energy Invested. In other words, as fuels become scarcer, it takes increasing amounts of energy (and money, see below) to get energy out of them. EROEI is the after-the-fact problem discovered with ethanol from corn as a fuel; it takes a lot of energy to grow and convert the corn into ethanol.

The oil in the tar sands is in what’s called an “unconventional form.” It’s a very thick slurry, a tar, called bitumen. You may know bitumen as that pungent black stuff that’s heated and spread on roofs. Making usable oil out of the semi-solid tar is an energy intense process, rendering the resulting energy far less productive.

Bitumen from the Alberta tar sand before processing

Bitumen from the Alberta tar sand before processing

Cost

Directly related to the above, energy from tar sands costs more than many other types of energy. Why then, you ask, is it financially attractive to business? The short answer is that the deck is stacked. The combination of perverse tax incentives (incentives, usually supported by special interests, which work against the public and/or government’s interest) and the market’s failure to include true costs create the illusion of cost competitiveness.

Independence

The common rationale here is the expanding tar sands oil production will reduce dependence on Middle East oil sources. But because US oil demand is already diminishing due to higher fuel efficiency standards and the recession, most of the tar sands oil will end up being exported.

exporting tar sands oil

Environment

The Canadian tar sands are located under the Boreal forest, according to Treehugger “one of the largest intact ecosystems left on the planet.” The open pit mining process utterly obliterates any ecosystem that has the misfortune to have resided above it.

Boreal forest before; tar sands after. source

Boreal forest before; tar sands after. source

In addition to the energy required, it takes vast amounts of water to extract oil from tar sands, causing both water depletion and pollution.

Most damningly, the extraction process has “three times the global warming pollution of conventional crude production.” Releasing the carbon imbedded in the tar sands, accompanied by the burning of fuel to extract it, would push the CO2 levels in the atmosphere past the tipping point, constituting “game over” for the climate in the words of NASA’s James Hansen.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.

So even if oil from tar sands was truly economically viable – which it isn’t – it would be a huge and irreversible environmental mistake to use it.

Significance

An oft-used rationale for the pipeline is that Canada is going to utilize the tar sands regardless of whether the US allows building the means to transport it by pipe down to the Gulf of Mexico refineries. Perhaps, but there is no reason we should enable them to do so. And by no means all of Canada supports tar sands production; our sending such a message may encourage Canadian opposition.

Furthermore, KC Golden writes at Grist “It’s a statement of principle for climate action….It’s a moral referendum on our willingness to do the simplest thing we must do to avert catastrophic climate disruption: Stop making it worse.”

OK, so….

You may ask: where’s the EcoOptimism aspect here? Since all we get from tar sands oil is a delay in the upcoming end of oil age, accompanied by the potentially disastrous (in the truest sense of the word) increase in climate disruption, wouldn’t it make a helluva lot more sense to take the government and commercial investments and place them in energy efficiency and renewable forms of energy? (You know, the ones like solar and wind that both don’t run out and don’t screw up the climate we depend on.) The Return on Investment for these holds much higher promise, and that’s before we start to include the avoided costs of rising sea levels. It should, in short, be a no-brainer.

In fact, Joe Nocera wrote “this should be a no-brainer for the president” in today’s Times. Unfortunately, however, he was referring to supporting the pipeline, and the fact that he was unable to sway the “boneheaded” (his word) opinion of James Hansen in a conversation they just had.

I’d prefer to refrain from such descriptions, but if there is boneheadedness to be found, it is in Nocera’s contorted logic, which ranges from fatalist statements such as “Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to remain the world’s dominant energy source for the foreseeable future” to writing off the idea that a carbon fee could reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 percent within 10 years with a mere “well, maybe.”

Kind of makes you wonder about the meaning of “no-brainer.”

 

 

Everything But the Facts

In my recent post for National Geographic’s Great Energy Challenge Blog , “The Limited Vision of the Pro-Nuclear Energy Argument,” (which was a version of my EcoOptimism post “Answering the Wrong Question”), one of the commenters wrote:  “it is a fact that only carbon-based energy and nuclear have a high enough energy density to meet our world’s demands. None of the renewables come close.”

I wrote back “It is far from “fact” that only carbon-based and nuclear energy sources can meet the world’s needs. There are many studies showing that a combination of renewable sources can indeed meet that need. And that will be easier still with a rethinking of what we employ energy for and how it actually improves our lives.”

I was referring, in part, to several things I’d read including the WWF’s 2011 “Energy Report,” which states “By 2050, we could get all the energy we need from renewable sources,” and a 2009 article in Scientific American titled “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables.” An indicator that we might even be headed in the right direction was a Climate Progress post “Wind And Solar Make Up 100% Of New U.S. Electricity Capacity In September” and other reports that the growth in renewable energy outpaced conventional sources last year.

Um, yes we can?

Um, yes we can?

Then, almost on demand, up pops a post by the inestimable Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in which he responds to President Obama’s recent statement that we “need some big technological breakthrough” to tackle climate change.

Mr. President — our nation already has the technologies to protect the climate while advancing prosperity. Here’s how.

Your National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed just last June how to produce 80 to 90 percent of America’s electricity from proven, reliable and increasingly competitive renewable sources like the sun and wind.

Lovins points to findings from his RMI book “Reinventing Fire” describing how a combination of energy efficiency and renewables can indeed meet the world’s future energy requirements. Energy efficiency, he writes, “can save 44 percent of projected 2050 electricity needs through proven building and industrial technologies that pay back far faster than any new source of supply. Wasting far less energy and getting the rest at lower and stable prices would powerfully boost jobs and growth.”

Then “conventional wisdom is wrong that solar and wind aren’t viable without a breakthrough in electricity storage. Analysis and experience prove that 60-80 percent solar and windpower — sited across a region, forecasted, and balanced by flexible supply and demand — can keep the lights on with often less storage or backup than traditional giant power stations need now. That’s how Germany, without adding storage, is already one-fourth renewable-powered, and at times last spring met over half its electric load just with solar power. A smart grid will make this even more successful and resilient.”

(You may have heard about the rather spectacular recent claim on Fox News that solar power works better in Germany than it could here because “they’ve got a lot more sun than we do.” There are many reasons, all involving policies, incentives and economics, that solar power has been more successful there than here, but amount of sunshine is definitively not one of them.)

My bet is that the commenter above could provide a bunch of similarly confidant sounding reports supporting his statement.

Believing in facts?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted: “I'm often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: "Do you believe in Gravity?" Image source: Sodahead


Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted: “I’m often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: “Do you believe in Gravity?” Image source: Sodahead

My father, who was a science journalist (and covered some of the early environmental stories), had a plaque on his desk with the quote “There are three sides to every story. Yours, mine and the facts.” But that was before the age of instant digital communications, sound bites and Citizens United. Now, it seems, there are just two sides: your facts and my facts. And anything, repeated often enough, now takes on the feeling of fact.

It’s become increasingly difficult to ascertain whose facts are, in fact, factual. I subscribe to the “follow the money” rule, or rather, don’t follow the money. Self-interest is an incredibly strong force and money, these days, is its enabler. Virtually every climate denier’s “fact” can be traced to “research” or reports funded by corporate, usually fossil fuel, interests.

The counterclaim, frequently utilized in “climate gate” and elsewhere, is that scientists manipulate facts in order to secure funding for their research — as if that funding amounts to even a miniscule fraction of what corporate grant recipients and lobbyists receive. (Even that, by the way, doesn’t always work.)  And never mind that scientific findings go through strenuous competitive peer review before being labeled facts, while the only review of most corporate statements is by their public relations departments.

I know this is a dangerously broad statement and subject to the great observation by Mark Twain that all generalizations are false. But I’ve seen little to lead me to believe otherwise.

It’s Not the Economy vs the Environment

What to make of the mixed message in Sunday’s New York Times op-ed by David Leonhardt? Dispelling the prevalent and stubborn myth that environmental measures are a drag on economic recovery is critical to efforts to gain public and political support. Leonhardt attempts to help, but misses some of the most important points.

In a piece with the overused title “It’s Not Easy Being Green” (and, speaking of mixed messages,  the opposing title, “It’s Easy Being Green,” is just as cliché), Leonhardt at first downplays the promise and economic viability of a national policy to address climate change. “The alternative-energy sector may ultimately employ millions of people. But raising the cost of the energy that households and businesses use every day — a necessary effect of helping the climate — is not exactly a recipe for an economic boom.” With that, he seems to validate the environment versus economy faceoff.

Is this how to gauge environmental policy? Image source

Is this how to gauge environmental policy? Image source

He then tempers that a bit when he writes “Alternative energy may not be a solution to our economic problems. But neither is it guaranteed to make those problems much worse, despite the continuing claims of opponents.” Faint praise, but at least it’s not condemnation.

And he starts to get it right with “The stronger argument for a major government response to climate change is the more obvious argument: climate change.” Problem is: climate change, in and of itself, has not proved to be a strong enough argument, at least not in our current head-in-the-sands, corporate-driven political arena. It’s clear that in a head to head battle, even with a public relations boost from Sandy and Nemo and the like, the environment still loses out to the economy. So it doesn’t help when Leonhardt continues:

In some cases, [government environmental programs] may even save taxpayers money over the long run. In most cases, however, they probably will not. Government agencies, like households and businesses, use dirty energy today because it is cheaper. And while it’s true that new clean-energy companies may help the economy by earning profits and employing workers, the same is true of coal and oil companies.

Leonhardt misses the boat in exactly the same way, as I pointed out last week, the pro-nuclear power advocates do – seeing only parts of pictures rather than wholes. When he says dirty energy is cheaper, he is looking only at a partial set of costs, ignoring major “external costs” like public health, resource depletion and national security. The savings he refers to are merely the direct ones like reduced energy bills and (inconclusively, in his mind) new jobs. Those are well and fine, but it’s incomplete accounting.

This is the same reason elected officials from coal mining states think they’re doing the right thing in opposing environmental regulations on coal; the loss of coal industry jobs, according to this type of partial accounting, will hurt their constituents. But when true costs such as the health costs for miners and those living nearby and the costs of polluted waters and ravaged land are taken into account, that calculation is turned on its head. (Help me out here – I read a post just last week which cited numbers for exactly this example, but I can’t find it now. Send me the link if you have it.)

The costs of coal mining are far more than just CO2 emissions. Image source

The costs of coal mining are far more than just CO2 emissions. Image source

The same point can be made with mass transit. The benefits are not only in the reduced fuel consumption and air pollution that people tend to focus on, but also in time saved due to less congestion and even improved well-being arising from commuting less stressfully as a passenger rather than a frustrated driver. Not to mention the fact that you can safely text your heart away. (See “Public Transportation Saved 865 Million Hours Of Delay On US Roads In 2011.”)

At the very bottom of his column, Leonhardt almost gets it. “In the end, the strongest economic argument for an aggressive response to climate change is not the much trumpeted windfall of green jobs. It’s the fact that the economy won’t function very well in a world full of droughts, hurricanes and heat waves.” Ahah, now we’re talking about the larger picture, or at least some of it. But it’s so far down at the end that it’s all but a footnote, and an incomplete one at that.

Yes, in that battle for public support, if it’s the environment versus the economy – especially in a troubled economic time like this – the environment’s gonna lose.  But that’s an entirely wrong scenario, one created by the limited vision of conventional political-economic thinking (and avidly supported by corporate self-interests). I’ve noted this in earlier posts as, of course, others have as well. In a blog post wonderfully titled “It’s not the economy, it’s the stupid paradigm,” Paula Williams writes “the economy and the environment are not separate (contrary to the claims of many economists).”

Public support for environmentalism has been waning since the start of the Great Recession, and not just in the US, as Greenbiz.com notes.

Across eighteen countries, public concern about all six issues – water pollution, fresh water shortages, natural resource depletion, air pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss – is way down from its peak in 2009, with double-digit falls in the proportion of the public considering them “very serious.”

[O]ur figures suggest people are starting to tune…out [messages of doom and gloom]. Ultimately, the challenge for the environmental movement is to articulate an alternative to our current economic model that empowers people rather than constrains them, and that is politically achievable in difficult times.

The alternative economic model is the understanding that our environmental solutions are our economic solutions. That, along with the observation that those combined solutions – contrary once again to the claims of many economists and others — will also improve the quality of our lives, is the foundation of EcoOptimism.

 

Blowing Hot Air (A Wrongest Product Award nominee)

It may not be exactly seasonal wear in the northern hemisphere right now, what with an incoming blizzard and all, but this nominee for the Wrongest Product Awards might seem very appealing in Australia’s current record-breaking summer heat. Its impetus, however, comes not from Down Under, but from Japan in the wake of the Fukushima meltdowns and the resulting summer power shortages in which air conditioning was cut back. And at first glance, air conditioned clothing kinda makes sense: why cool entire rooms when all you really need to lower the temperature of is … yourself?

air_conditioned_pants

Kuchofuku’s Air-Conditioned Cooling pants feature two battery powered fans to keep your legs cool, and there’s a jacket to accompany.

But like so many of our other choices, this decision between a lot of air conditioning  and a bunch less volume to cool (albeit with questionable style) is a false dilemma. As Gizmodo writer Molly Oswaks observed last summer “pants with their own built-in A/C are not as brilliant as my sun-addled mind first thought. Because: shorts.”

Which logically leads to the next solution, also from Japan (no surprise!): just walking around in your previously nominated ad-supported underwear. At least then the ads would be visible.

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

 

Economic Insurrection, or Nature’s Economy vs Wall Street’s

If you’re into economics (and, after all, who isn’t?), you probably see economic theory as divided into two camps, supply-side and Keynesian, that roughly coincide with Conservatives/Republicans and Democrats. Supply-side economics became better known as trickle-down economics while Keynesian economics is grouped with neoclassical economics.

But never mind all that. If you were reading closely (and not already bored by this slew of terminology), you may have noticed that Liberals or Progressives were not represented above. That’s because, in the eyes of many lefties, neither of those economic camps has it right. In short, both schools ignore nature and therefore are fundamentally wrong about how the world – and the economy that is a subset of it – works. They deal instead in an artificial idea of economics in which humanity essentially lives in a vacuum.

No, that’s not quite right either. If we somehow actually did live in a vacuum, we’d have to provide everything on our own. There’d be no oxygen or water or coal or, well, anything. But we don’t and can’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, we draw upon nature for everything we make or consume.

What if bees charged for pollinating?

What if bees charged for pollinating?

The problem is that conventional economics pretty much ignores that fact. It regards nature as free. We can take anything we want from it and we can dump anything left over into it. It’s the ultimate free lunch. And as fans of Robert Heinlein, Barry Commoner or Milton Friedman know, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Conventional economics also regards nature as unlimited, at least in a theoretical sort of way. The thinking is that we’ll never run out of something because its price will increase as its availability diminishes and, as that price goes up, we’ll either use less or switch to alternatives.

But there are a lot of problems with this approach. An obvious one is that some things in nature, like oxygen or water, are irreplaceable. If we run out of those, or if they become exorbitantly expensive, it’s game over.

Yet we don’t really put prices on those things either. They’re “free as air.”  Which means we don’t know the true cost of things. (Riffing on Oscar Wilde, the authors of Natural Capitalism wrote “People now know the price of everything but the true cost of nothing.”)

We do put prices on everything we do. (Well, more or less. A lot of the most important things we do, like raising children or taking care of elderly parents, are considered to be outside the economy.) When nature does it though – when nature, for instance, grows a tree or makes oil – that doesn’t appear anywhere in our ledgers. Yet the benefits are ours for the taking.

The alternative goes by a few names. Perhaps the most widely used is ecological economics. I alluded to it in my facetiously titled post Planets Are People My Friends. The acknowledgement that conventional economics has this fundamental flaw goes back quite some time, but has only started to gain wider recognition more recently. Sometimes on the fringes: the True Cost Economics Manifesto, with strident, almost revolutionary language, seems to have appeared around 2005. (The original website is gone, but the manifesto is reposted at Adbusters, among other places.)

But more recently, perhaps as some of the signers of that manifesto graduated into the “real” world, the fringe has moved inward, with a widespread understanding that the Earth’s “commons” (its air and water and other resources) are not a fee-free dumping ground.

It’s not just a matter of calculating and finding a way to charge the “true costs” of the things we make and do. It becomes part of a larger understanding, in some ways a philosophy, of both the economy’s and humanity’s purposes. In the blog Common Dreams: Building Progressive Community, economist David Korten asks “What Would a Down-to-Earth Economy Look Like? How did we end up with Wall Street when models for a healthy economy are all around us?” He comes up with this comparison of nature’s economy vs Wall Street’s:

Korten writes: “With proper care and respect, Earth can provide a high quality of life for all people in perpetuity. Yet we devastate productive lands and waters for a quick profit, a few temporary jobs, or a one-time resource fix.”

Over at the Center for Steady State Economics, Rob Dietz (co-author of Enough Is Enough, which I reviewed here) has a two-part post “The Rise of Fantasy as the Basis for Economic Policy” and “Restoring Science as the Basis for Economic Policy.” There are, he says, two camps of economic thinking, Fantasy Camp and Science Camp, and you can easily guess which one he falls into.

At Fantasy Camp, the counselors educate campers to believe that humanity can circumvent natural limits. Campers are taught that our unstoppable ingenuity can overcome any resource shortages or manage any amount of waste generation. There’s a strong undercurrent of consumption — a desire to accumulate ever more power and stuff in an attempt to gain complete control over life (and even death).

fantasy_science_camps

(My take on this was probably decided many years ago when my parents sent me to – literally – a science camp. Unfortunately, it was long before geeks were cool. But I digress.)

In EcoOptimism parlance, Wall Street’s economy is based on “win” only and the hell with everything else, while Nature’s is win-win-win. In other words, the one per cent vs 100%.