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The Price of Environmental Destruction? There Is None
Putting a price on nature becomes meaningless if we treat the ecosystems upon which we depend as mere commodities with a price for trading
The economy is no stranger to creating its own fantasy world with little or no relation to the real one. We witnessed the damage that can cause when the banks thought they had stumbled on financial alchemy and could transform bad debt into good – economic base metal into gold.
Now it's possible that a much bigger error is coming to light. The rise and rise of global corporations lifted on a wave of apparent productivity gains may have been little more than a mask for the reckless liquidation of natural capital. It's as if we've been so distracted by our impressive speed of economic travel that we forgot to look at the fuel gauge or the cloud of smog left in our wake.
A new UN report estimates that accounting for the environmental damage of the world's 3,000 biggest companies would wipe out one-third of their profits. Any precise figure, however, is a matter of how risk is quantified and of where you draw the line. In 2006, for example, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), of which I am the policy director, looked at the oil companies BP and Shell, who together had recently reported profits of £25bn. By applying the Treasury's own estimates of the social and environmental cost of carbon emissions, we calculated that the total bill for those costs would reach £46.5bn, massively outweighing profits and plunging the companies into the red.
Yet in exercises like this, we quickly hit the paradox of environmental economics. By putting a price on nature, hopefully it makes it less likely that we will treat the world, and its natural resources, as if it were a business in liquidation. Yet there is a point when it becomes meaningless to treat the ecosystems upon which we depend as mere commodities with a price for trading. For example, what price would you put on the additional tonne of carbon which, when burned, triggers irreversible, catastrophic climate change? Who would have the right to even consider selling off the climate upon which civilisation depends? The avoidance of such damage is literally priceless.
If that sounds dramatic, consider that last September a large, international group of scientists published a paper in the journal Nature which identified nine key planetary boundaries for key biological systems upon which we depend. They found that we had already transgressed three of those, and were on the cusp of several others. All are potential points of no return as such complex systems begin interacting.
The huge advantage of the UN work is that it attempts to improve the feedback system between the economy and its ultimate parent company, the biosphere. Better risk assessment and value measurement is essential to help prevent what happened to banks happening to the planet.
The concept of a balanced budget, so loved by conservatives in relation to finance and spending, seems to be an alien concept when the consumption of natural resources and the production of waste is concerned. Yet it is far more important to achieve a balanced environmental budget than an economic one. You can always print more money, but you can't print more planet. As John Ruskin put it, "There is no wealth but life."
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26 Comments so far
Show All... and when all the trees are gone and you cannot breathe the air and there is no water and there is nothing to eat, what will your money buy you then?
[paraphrasing a Native American saying]
/cm
Someone should then remind the conservatives, the Republicans, that their party did at one time have a very favorable regard for the environment and responsible stewardship.
Then remind them again. Then again until they admit it.
Problem is, we're dealing with NEO-conservatives/Repubs whose bottom line is money and power over EVERYTHING!
My old horticulture teacher, Rich Merrill, used to say "Ecology is long-term economics". He also said, "Nature bats last". Point is, there is no "economy" outside of planetary ecology. The first is a subset, a fairly small and until recently, insignificant subset of the latter.
We pay more per unit gas and water delivered when we exceed a certain level of consumption, so why shouldn't polluters pay more for the highest marginal or incremental carbon offsets? And why, if any of this is supposed to actually work, would Congress and the White House advocate GIVING the credits away? In what possible way are free carbon credits a disincentive to reduce output?
Rich eh?
We will have his walking papers drawn up soon!
We must rid the schools of such trouble makers!
Our blindness to the damage done to Earth's environment may very well doom us to extinction. If not extinction, then a human population that is a tiny fraction of what it now is.
Jim Shea
Lovelock and Hansen don't think we'll actually go completely extinct, but that sounds damned optimistic to me.
I have my doubts that we could withstand the plagues that would follow a population crash involving all high-order life. Especially when the deaths would be due to Earth's conditions having become drastically different to the one in which we all evolved.
What I suspect would happen is that the elites would decide to sacrifice the rest of us in hope of saving themselves, but then die off because their success is in manipulating others, not in doing anything useful. But, as people as different as Alexander Pope, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jack Benny, and Jared Diamond have noted in different contexts, most elites are so disordered that death would be preferable to losing their wealth and power.
Been saying a LONG time now that the United States was getting a bit of a free ride thanks to abundant resources -- from iron ore to oil -- and much of our amazing economic progress from 1941 to 1980 was due to the careless and foolhardy manner in which we exploited them. Now the real costs are coming due and we've bankrupted ourselves in trying to keep up an unsustainable level of life. But who listened to a crazy dude from Rough River? Well, people ARE waking up to this, if too slowly. Seventy some percentage of the American public IS looking for ways to decrease their carbon footprint, so once again the public is ahead of our legislators.
We probably reached peak oil and peak affluence several years ago and are in a downhill slide. We can steer away from the rocks and trees but not much else. We are going DOWN.
Gary
"It is only when you despair of all ordinary means, it is only when you convince it that it must help you or you perish, that the seed of life in you bestirs itself to provide a new resource.”
-- Robert Collier
And still, 7,000,000,000 people are NOT a consideration, never have been and never will be and the 7,000,000 elite will have carte blanche to what is left of the environment.
But look out, that next glaciation maybe just be here before you know it.
capitalists have always known about what harm they are doing to our planet. For some reason they just don't care. what happened- no wait what did not happen at copenhagen may have been the last emphatic, irreversible death sentence for Planet Earth.
Unless we can get our planet back, take it away from them, make sure they understand they do not own it.
but until that happens we are doomed.
I've said for decades that there is no necessary relationship between what we call economics and the natural world. What this article makes clear in an unusual way is that what relationship there is between capitalist bookkeeping and the natural world is PERVERSE.
If I understand the figures correctly for BP and Shell profits versus the cost of a single "externality," namely carbon emissions, for every dollar of "profit" to these companies, we and the planet paid about two titular dollars. Their profits are our losses times two.
And, yes, I am aware of the article's point that these things are ultimately priceless, but the boneheads on Wall Street need a way to quantify so they can commodify and financialize and rape Mother Earth.
Castrate the MFs, by any means available... We need a new eugenics.
-30-
And When All the Trees are Gone
There are parts of the world
that swallow us
before we can blink. Dancers
called herons and hawks
spiral up and out and the whole mountain
shakes into the rivers that it made
until it is done, until we are through.
We travel childless then
we stone the mothers of our dreams.
The last quadrant of the fertile fields
sheds its good dirt
until the bays and gulfs boil
and suffocate. The walls we have made
just to keep the aliens out
are just as good at keeping us in.
In the end none of the seasons matter
because we've stopped watching the stars
because there are no stars to watch
and all my loves, all my dahlias of meaning
burn and rot in the fumes of war.
Don't say this is too dark.
Don't say we will yet be vindicated
by the gold in our seams
and the oil in our lamps
and the boxes we carry away from the flood.
*
I have wanted to ride the horses of Orion
I have waited to fish in the rivers of time
I have wanted to gulp in the lakes of my memories
I have dreamt my dreams turned to beaches
I have watched the world cave in on the islands
I have seen the kings order more prisons
I have been numbed to the keening of those that remain.
*
Still, there will be others, our secret twins even,
who will carry us through
what ever you think, however the moon shows
above the shrinking ice fields
whatever bears last or tigers swim
silent through the mangrove
I know what I believe in cannot be taken
This is the song of the last lake rising
This is the song I will leave when I'm gone.
-- Bob Vance
Sioux Rose
BOB: I love your poetry! I do make it a point to still be outside with the stars. Sometimes I ride my bicycle home from my boyfriend's place late at night and the canopy of heaven is there in its magic... so far from city lights. It still amazes me. A friend of mine used to go out in his kayak on a moonless night into the Dismal Swamp. He told me how the reflection of the stars on the water made him feel he was paddling through space, itself. Very mystical. And I think sometimes unseen doorways open and our senses walk into worlds our logical minds do not understand (and perhaps, apart from poets like you, have no words/names for)... thresholds get crossed; and the self can never entirely return to the confines it previously knew itself by and through.
P.S. Have you evet heard Flora Purim sing "Windows"? (That song fits what I just related.)
Thanks SR.
I've always liked your input on CD.
I think people who have access to clear dark nights and can see the stars are blessed with an understanding of place and perspective that is not available in any other way. I am fortunate enough to live on the coast of one of the Great Lakes where true darkness is still available. When the comet Hale Bopp came over I could stand on my back deck and watch its progress against the winter night sky...opposite from Orion... for the months it was there. Magic! Now there is a new light over one of the homes behind ours that has brightened and blunted the night considerably... still, getting out of town or to a less disturbed night sky is not so hard.
One summer night, in the early nineties, the sky was completely filled with the Aurora Borealis... which I had seen before and have since but never like this... the whole sky throbbing and electric!!
The skies over the shores of the northern parts of the upper Great lakes remain dark... the Milky Way still a ribbon of undulating depth where one can pick out and ascertain distances between the various heavenly bodies. One year I while camping on a lakeshore I was able to help my boy pick out Mars, Venus and Jupiter... and then we could actually plot out the plane where the earth spun in relation to those other planets and the earth's shadow on the moon by observing those planets... we could feel the depth and direction of the orbit and the place earth spun with us on it through the solar system. This was mind blowing and better than any drug. I can still hear my son say "Whoa!"
I have also done some swimming and kayaking on such nights as you describe.... the line between sky and water nonexistent... you are there a stone being polished between the two greatest elements of being!
Sioux Rose
BOB: Your son is lucky to have you as a father. Although I do believe the child (at the soul level) chooses the parents, this choice being based on previous lifetime interactions, the lessons the parents' lifestyle choices and personality inclinations will bring to the child, and the overall karmic credits & debits to be worked out. With all that having been said, to have a father who looks upon the world with such an open heart and poetic spirit HAS to be a gift!
My best friend is raising her grandson, and I feel that way about their relationship. When she drives him to school in the morning, she asks him about his dreams during the previous night. She's taught him to observe the relationship between what he eats (especially when she lets him have something sugary) and how he feels. Education in Florida is like processing robots; and as a counter-measure she gives this boy so much support for being who he is. She cries to me that it's such a struggle because everything at school stands to try to knock the spirit of discovery and personal uniqueness out of him. And then I remind her that this grandson, an Aquarian, was NOT born to follow the rules. That he is extremely lucky to have her dedication as his ally.
I'd like to think my daughters will one day think themselves lucky to have been raised by a poetic radical mystic. I know my grandson and I really resonate. I can't wait till he's back in Florida again. Did you win your wife's heart with seductive verse? My ex-husband once said to me, "Susannah, let me walk inside of you to feel your thoughts." Wow! I think that line "got" me. I keep a little journal with "the best lines" a man in the throes of courtship ever offered me. "I want you in my life... for the rest of it." And lots more. As I enter into the autumn phase of my life, these romantic memories warm me before the ice of winter sets in upon the boughs.
My wife (or partner, together thirty years without the benefit, or curse, of clergy or the state... unmarried bliss!)and I met when we were both in a theatrical production. It is her son through a previous marriage that I call my son... he thinks of me as his dad and doesn't remember when I wasn't there. Lives in Florida actually.
There are still struggles in all of this. The world is a difficult place and its influence deeply learned in how we and our children walk through it. The spiritual dimension, to me anyway, however we perceive or deny it, is helpful and adds depth but isn't a panacea don't you think?
Ever been to Cassedega? (We are drifting WAY off thread... who cares!)
Sioux Rose
Good morning: I believe the spiritual must complement the political/social/economic arrangements of any society. It is only through academia's "separation of disciplines," what I sometimes term "tyranny through nomenclature" that such artificial barriers are held up between quite related subjects.
I have been to Casadega, and it is such an odd place! In fact I use its little hotel (I asked permission to use the actual name in a script, and was denied; so instead termed it the "Lost in Time" cafe) as a location in my first movie script. It centers around a (hidden) god from Olympus, one raised behind the backs of Zeus and the male bubbas, who comes to earth to minister to the "sexually challenged and romantically dispossessed." Three women do a little ritual at the lake in Casedega which coincides with an eclipse that opens the veil between heaven and earth. As a result, my god, Iatisse, enters the earth plane AT Casedega. I think the script is a scream, and portions came to life AS REAL in my experience, i.e. situations running parallel with the script. Those and other odd events of my literary life will one day be chronicled in my "Memoirs of a Mystic."
Casedega has a sister community in Lilydale, New York, too.
Any residing on earth have to take responsibility, as Carlos Casteneda's teacher Don Juan put it, for "living in a wierd world."
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell also did it your way, and it's been sustained. Next time I "go to bat," I doubt I'll bother with any legal paperwork.
Wow!
"tyranny through nomenclature". yes. How does one justify perception of artificial impermeable separations when everything demonstrates connection? But then we are talking about the shift from Cartesian logic to Sytems logic. Ever see the movie "Mindwalk"....? Liv Ullman, Sam Waterston and John Heard (although the main character is, I think, Mt Saint Michel in France)
I had the perception in Casadega, the first time I visited, of a very elephantine, below human hearing, vibration. Not unlike what I heard/felt when we visited the standing stones in Carnac, France. More connections!
We'll be seeing you around CD eh?... wish there was a way to connect otherwise but I am leary of putting info here. Got any other ideas?
let them eat bundled mortgage securities!
The corporate business form, reflecting our ignorance, fear and greed, was the choice that killed us.
A few generations after the climate turns, the only ones living may well be the ones least touched by this corporate cancer.
We were not H. Sapiens Sapiens, we were H. Techno Cleverass.
CORP IS BORG.
Many cultures around the world have been largely sustainable within their land-base..."
But they were sustainable only because their populations were small.
One tree is worth a googol of anti-climate change believers. Oh, and on March 27th at 8:30 p.m., the plan is for the entire planet to shut off all lights. Perhaps in darkness, we will all finally see the light.
This article hit the nail on the head on the environmental issue.
AD
This article hit the nail on the head on the environmental issue.
AD