Environmental Debt (part 2)

January 23, 2015

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Amy Larkin argues that by failing to factor in the future environmental costs of present economic activity, businesses are incurring debts that will have to be paid by someone. Externalizing such costs from business to society at large, and even future generations, boosts profits and makes environmentally damaging practices seem more economical than they really are. Since environmentally friendly practices are often less profitable in the short run, how can a free-market economy embrace them?

Private initiatives

One hopeful sign is that some corporations and their accounting firms are beginning to see the need for more “integrated” accounting, which includes environmental costs in financial calculations. “In November 2011, Puma became the first multinational corporation to create an integrated report that converted environmental information and data into monetary terms. The company’s 2010 Environmental Profit & Loss statement (EP&L) quantifies and monetizes environmental impact and integrates it into the operational P&L.” The results were startling: Puma found that its earnings would have been 75 percent lower if it had been charged the full cost of its operations.

Integrated accounting is challenging. Ideally it would include the cost of a product from “cradle to grave,” including the cost of disposing of it safely. Puma only got as far as “cradle to gate” accounting, the costs incurred in getting products to market. The more costs are considered, the more production and consumption practices may need to change to reduce them.

Larkin provides many examples of companies that are looking beyond short-term profits and trying to develop more sustainable ways of operating. Tiffany’s has taken initiative to reform mining practices, where “irresponsible mines, large and small, caused serious problems with water pollution, dislocation of local people, cyanide and heavy metal pollution and human rights abuses.” One incentive for Tiffany’s was to disassociate such practices from the image of their jewelry, which is supposed to be about “celebration and pleasure and memorializing love.”

Walmart shocked the retail world in 2006 by launching its sustainability initiative, vowing to “be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain people and the environment.” This has been controversial with the company’s own shareholders, some of whom accused the leadership of socialism. (What socialist idea will they come up with next–decent wages?)

Unilever is the world’s largest ice cream company and a leader in methods of refrigeration. They decided to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs, a major contributor to climate change) from their coolers because they anticipated future regulations. They didn’t want to “get caught in costly and difficult supply problems reacting to a new regulatory framework imposed upon us,” in the words of their Vice President of Sustainability. They also went a step further, setting up an advocacy office to push for new industry standards and stricter regulation.

This brings up the point that social problems require social solutions. If only one company incurs the short-term costs of change, it may put itself at a competitive disadvantage and be punished by the market. The goal has to be for environmentally friendly innovations to be adopted throughout an industry, either through cooperative agreements or new regulations, or both. Larkin herself was a keynote speaker at the Sustainable Refrigeration Summit of the Consumer Goods Forum, an organization representing 400 retailers and manufacturers. Shortly after, the CGF board approved a recommendation to phase out HFCs.

Public initiatives

Larkin also praises far-sighted government initiatives when they have occurred. She cites the substantial health and financial benefits that have come from the Clean Air Act of 1963. More recently, however, “government is actually proving less reliable than business these days when it comes to environmental protection.” She doesn’t get into the politics of it, but clearly one of our major political parties has become steadfast in its opposition to new environmental legislation. The White House solar panels are a clue: Jimmy Carter had them put in, and Ronald Reagan had them taken out.

One area in which Larkin sees a role for government is in building a new energy infrastructure, with a smart grid and new storage capacity technology. Because renewable energy will be less centralized, it is “more complicated to ramp up than building a new Hoover Dam or a big nuclear power plant. Decentralized energy means that many players, many financiers and many regulations must align before taking action.” Larkin says that building the new energy infrastructure will cost about as much as going to war with Iraq. (One wonders why it’s so much easier to get support for war than for a safer and more sustainable energy system.)

One state that has moved ahead on its own is California. The California Solar Initiative (CSI) provides free solar installations for building owners who will make a ten-year commitment to buying solar power. With an annual budget of $3 billion, CSI provides more energy than Duke Energy gets from a new coal plant with similar up-front cost. But the environmental cost is much greater for dirty coal than for clean solar. The refusal to make such social investments will cost society more in the long run.

The challenge

At the end of her book, Larkin describes our current dilemma very bluntly. “If coal and oil cost their true prices based on new financial rules, how will that melt down the economy? If coal and oil continue to be underpriced, how will that melt down the environment?”

Opposition to making businesses accountable for environmental costs is understandable, since doing so seems very threatening to our present economy. Consumer prices would go up; some businesses would fail; some workers would lose their jobs. But carrying on business-as-usual will cost us more in the long run. The solution is a transition to business practices that can succeed without imposing such heavy environmental costs. If we are willing to share the start-up costs, new industries can flourish. The solar and wind energy industries each employ more workers than the coal industry already.

[M]any phenomenal technologies and systems are just coming to market or in development for water and energy efficiency. They will be deployed rapidly and at full scale only when their competitors no longer receive a financial advantage by overusing and polluting these same natural resources with no financial penalty. That means that we, the public, might have to spend more in the short term to provide these first movers a strong market advantage.

Change is hard, and no doubt there will be winners and losers. But if we can make the transition, we should see a net gain in the health and prosperity of the nation.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Environmental Debt

January 22, 2015

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Amy Larkin. Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of the Changing Global Economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Amy Larkin is an environmentalist with a background in marketing. She says that her “worldview connects an inherent love of nature with an abiding respect and admiration for the power and dynamism of business.” As director of Greenpeace Solutions, she has specialized in working with businesses to come up with economical solutions to environmental problems.

Although Larkin praises many businesses for being part of the solution, she is generally critical of big business for being part of the problem:

I think that corporations generally want it both ways. They want the rights of an individual to influence policy and the right to use unlimited money to influence elections. Most profoundly, executives and boards use the protection of the corporate veil against liability for their decisions that impact the economy, the environment and virtually anything else that affects people’s day-to-day lives.

That, of course, is not the way a free-market economy is supposed to work. Larkin uses the concept of “environmental debt” to explain how supposedly rational economic behavior can have destructive consequences.

Environmental debt

The heart of the problem is that businesses can make short-term profits while doing long-term damage. Environmental debt consists of “polluting and/or damaging actions that will cost other parties…real money in the future. And just like any other debt, at some point the bill will come due.” However, the businesses that did the damage will not necessarily be the ones to pay the debt.

One reason society has tolerated the accumulation of environmental debt is that we have regarded natural resources as inexhaustible. We thought there would always be enough fish in the sea, trees in the forest, clean water in the rivers and fossil fuels in the ground. Why pay the costs of protecting and replenishing resources, or of developing renewable resources, before an environmental crisis forces one to do so?

Larkin also uses a more conventional economic term that is closely related to environmental debt, and that is “externality.” An externality is a cost or benefit to someone who is not a party to an economic transaction. If toxic runoff from a production process pollutes a waterway, the health and cleanup costs may fall on people downstream rather than on the sellers and buyers of the product. Not having to bear those costs boosts profits for sellers and cuts prices for buyers, providing economic incentives to participate in that form of production. Businesses benefit in the short run by privatizing as much profit as possible while externalizing (or socializing) as many costs as possible. That’s both unfair and detrimental to society as a whole.

One result is that the market price of a product often fails to include its full cost. “A polluter is allowed to shift the environmental cost of its actions to other parties, so goods and services appear cheaper than their true cost.” For example, a study by Harvard’s Institute for Global Health and the Environment found that the true cost of using coal in the U.S. is between $350 and $500 billion a year higher than the market value of coal sold. “Its price is cheap only because it is subsidized by its own victims.”

Calculating the true cost of something isn’t easy. The true cost of oil would have to include the costs of cleaning up spills, the health costs of automobile emissions, and the military costs of keeping Middle East oil in friendly hands, not to mention the largely unknown costs of climate change. Estimates differ, but generally peg the true cost at least two or three times the price at the pump (even without trying to factor in climate change). Another form of questionable accounting is to count as an asset some $22 trillion of oil to which companies have access, although the actual burning of all that oil would probably result in catastrophic global warming. Some analysts call that a “stranded asset,” an apparent asset that can never actually be used.

When many of the costs are externalized, market competition among buyers and sellers is unable to allocate resources economically among forms of production. To put it simply, people buy and sell too much of the wrong stuff, and not enough of the right stuff. Business-as-usual seems very economical, while cleaner alternatives seem too expensive to be adopted. Our environmental problems reveal a massive market failure, which helps explain why so many free-market conservatives are reluctant to address those problems. (Okay, Larkin doesn’t actually make that last point, but I doubt that she would disagree.)

“Nature Means Business”

Larkin proposes the “Nature Means Business (NMB) Framework” as a new set of principles to govern economic activity.

The first principle is that the environmental costs of production can no longer be externalized and ignored. “Pollution can no longer be free and can no longer be subsidized.”

The second principle is that decision-making and accounting have to look beyond short-term profits. Businesses that don’t start thinking longer-term are setting themselves up for failure down the road.

The third principle is that government has to stop subsidizing business without regard to environmental impact. Instead it should provide incentives for environmentally friendlier practices and disincentives for damaging practices.

I will discuss how Larkin elaborates on these principles in my next post.

Continued

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The Zero Marginal Cost Society (part 2)

September 10, 2014

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The Collaborative Commons

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin published his classic essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Using sheep grazing on common land as his prime example, Hardin described how the pursuit of unbridled self-interest can be expected to destroy a common resource. Each individual keeps adding more sheep, since the benefits accrue to that individual while the costs are spread among many. Eventually the land is overgrazed and many sheep die. The conclusion: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

For many years, economists could see only two models for managing resources: the capitalist model of private ownership and the socialist model of government ownership and top-down regulation. Yet the idea of the Commons refused to die.

In 1986—18 years after Hardin’s essay seemed to put the last proverbial nail in the coffin of Commons theory—Carol Rose pried open the casket, breathing new life into what many had already concluded was a dead idea. The Northwestern University law professor entitled her salvo “The Comedy of the Commons,” a scathing rejoinder to Hardin’s earlier thesis. Her spirited and rigorous defense of Commons governance rousted the academic community, spurring a revival of Commons scholarship and practice.

Long before strong centralized states and modern capitalism, many societies did in fact manage resources like pastures, forests and irrigation systems through informal systems of rights and responsibilities accepted by all. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for her study of what makes such systems work, at least in certain contexts. I find it easier to imagine them working in small-scale settings like extended families or villages, but larger-scale societies with high-speed communications might also pull it off. Rifkin certainly thinks so. He envisions three kinds of Commons–Communications Commons, Energy Commons and Logistical Commons.

The Battle of the Century

Rifkin believes that the first half of this century will be dominated by the struggle between “prosumer collaboratists and investor capitalists.” Rifkin’s own involvement in that struggle began in 1979, when General Electric applied for a patent on a genetically engineered microorganism designed to consume oil spills. The US Patents and Trademark Office denied the patent, but the Supreme Court awarded it in a 5-4 decision. In 1987, the patent office ruled that any genetically engineered, multicellular organism could be patented. In 2002, the Foundation for Economic Trends, of which Rifkin is President, brought together 250 organizations from 50 countries in support of a “Treaty to Share the Genetic Commons.” It declared that the gene pool has an intrinsic value more fundamental than any commercial use, and it opposed the private ownership of genetic information in principle.

Private ownership of intellectual property may be necessary if such property is hard to produce without large investments of capital. But as the costs of acquiring and disseminating information plummet–the cost of reading DNA sequences is a case in point–Rifkin sees less to be gained by organizing society on the private ownership and profit model:

Patents and copyrights thrive in an economy organized around scarcity but are useless in an economy organized around abundance. Of what relevance is intellectual-property protection in a world of near zero marginal cost, where more and more goods and services are nearly free?

Like Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future?, Rifkin deplores the efforts of Big Data companies like Google and Facebook to collect, own and sell vast amounts of information collected from Internet users. He expects users to fight back, not by trying to charge for the information they provide, as Lanier would have it, but by “demanding that their knowledge be shared in open Commons for the benefit of all, rather than being siphoned off and enclosed in the form of intellectual property owned and controlled by a few.”

In the realm of energy, the battle will be between a centralized energy grid dominated by large producers and a decentralized grid where users produce and distribute a lot of their own renewable energy. Just this week, the New York Public Service Commission proposed such a “distributed” energy network.

The “Logistical Commons” would have a similar decentralized organization. Instead of big companies distributing products from a few warehouses and distribution centers, more sophisticated and standardized tracking would allow many enterprises to share the same facilities as needed.

The Sharing Society

In the Collaborative Commons described by Rifkin, people will get their information more from one another and less from centralized sources. Advertising will decline as people rely more on peer product reviews. Ownership will decline in value while access to shared resources will rise in value. That quintessential example of private property, automobile ownership, will become less important as car-sharing networks expand. Peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding will compete with bank financing.

This rosy picture of the future depends, of course, on the assumption that high productivity and general abundance will have made rugged individualism largely obsolete. People won’t feel as strong a need to rely on what is mine, but will be more comfortable benefitting from what is ours.

When the marginal cost of producing additional units of a good or service is nearly zero, it means that scarcity has been replaced by abundance. Exchange value becomes useless because everyone can secure much of what they need without having to pay for it. The products and services have use and share value but no longer have exchange value.

Rifkin does acknowledge two main threats to abundance that we will need to overcome: climate change and cyberterrorism.

A human transformation

Taking a very long view of history, Rifkin connects revolutions in communications and energy with revolutions in human consciousness:

The great economic paradigm shifts in human history not only bring together communication revolutions and energy regimes in powerful new configurations that change the economic life of society. Each new communication/energy matrix also transforms human consciousness by extending the empathic drive across wider temporal and spatial domains, bringing human beings together in larger metaphoric families and more interdependent societies.

The latest communications and energy revolution takes this process farther than ever before:

Is it not possible to imagine the next leap in the human journey— a crossover into biosphere consciousness and an expansion of empathy to include the whole of the human race as our family, as well as our fellow creatures as an extension of our evolutionary family?

Seeing society as a Collaborative Commons makes it easier to see the entire biosphere as a Commons as well:

By reopening the various Commons, humanity begins to think and act as part of a whole. We come to realize that the ultimate creative power is reconnecting with one another and embedding ourselves in ever-larger systems of relationships that ripple out to encompass the entire set of relationships that make up the biosphere Commons.

Finally, Rifkin contrasts the new “social entrepreneurialism” with the “commercial entrepreneurialism” that has been embedded in capitalist markets:

The new spirit is less autonomous and more interactive; less concerned with the pursuit of pecuniary interests and more committed to promoting quality of life; less consumed with accumulating market capital and more with accumulating social capital; less preoccupied with owning and having and more desirous of accessing and sharing; less exploitive of nature and more dedicated to sustainability and stewardship of the Earth’s ecology. The new social entrepreneurs are less driven by the invisible hand and more by the helping hand. They are far less utilitarian and far more empathically engaged.

I am inclined to be skeptical of utopian visions, and I’m usually willing to assume that capitalism will continue, although hopefully with some egalitarian reforms. Rifkin’s extrapolations from current trends do not seem unreasonable, however. The fact that we can’t seem to create enough gainful employment to distribute the benefits of our own productivity does not bode well for capitalism. How long will people accept a system that maintains technologically unnecessary scarcities for the many while generating great abundance for the few? The fundamental principle of the Collaborative Commons, that all people have access to valued resources so they can both produce and consume, may prove irresistible.

After reading Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, I had second thoughts about my own information-sharing activities because of concerns about the companies that collect and sell information that people provide for free. Rifkin helped restore my confidence that sharing is a good thing, and that the sharers will ultimately prevail over the monopolizers. One can certainly hope so.

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