Immediately after the passage quoted above, Joe continues:
We desperately need to challenge them with our own ideas. But first, we need to recognize the strategic differences between ideas and policies. We are caught up in a battle between carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and energy investments. All the while, conservative ideas continue to spread unchecked.
This is absolutely the case. And Joe is quite right to deem it important to articulate a contrasting set of ideas. But we need to do much more than simply advance a set of ideas-as I'm sure the folks at Rockridge must know. After all, George Lakoff has repeatedly argued that we need a strategic infrastructure to match the right. What I want to do here is take a look at the ideas Joe listed, and comment about the task of taking these ideas and developing an infrastructure for articulating them.
First, let's consider these:
Nature is the basis of our survival. We depend upon breathable air, drinkable water, and other "environmental services" in order to live. If we destroy the life-support systems that nature provides, we'll need to sink some serious money into building them on our own (sounds like an April Fool's Joke to me).
A healthy economy depends upon a healthy environment. Our wealth and prosperity are intimately bound to (1) our survival capacity and (2) all that makes flourishing possible. Markets cannot exist where there are no people. People can only exist where there is a capacity for life.
We all own the air. It is our right to have it clean. Companies have been damaging our air without paying the full cost of doing business. This has to change if we are to survive, let alone thrive. The environment is inherently valuable because it is a source of wealth (as the basis of our well-being). Companies should pay for damage to this collective wealth. This is the fair thing to do.
These ideas are expressions of a viewpoint embodied in the concept of ecosystem services. Wikipedia explains:
Humankind benefits from a multitude of resources and processes that are supplied by natural ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services and include products like clean drinking water and processes like the decomposition of wastes. Ecosystem services are distinct from other ecosystem products and functions because there is human demand for these natural assets. Services can be subdivided into five categories: provisioning such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits; and preserving, which includes guarding against uncertainty through the maintenance of diversity.
As human populations grow, so do the resource demand imposed on ecosystems and the impacts of our global footprint. Many people have been plagued with the misconception that these ecosystem services are
free, invulnerable and infinitely available. However, the impacts of anthropogenic use and abuse are becoming evermore apparent - air and water quality are increasingly compromised, oceans are being over-fished, pests and diseases are extending beyond their historical boundaries, deforestation is eliminating flood control around human settlements. It has been reported that approximately 40-50% of Earth's ice-free land surface has been heavily transformed or degraded by anthropogenic activities, 66% of marine fisheries are either overexploited or at their limit, atmospheric CO2 has increased more than 30% since the advent of industrialization, and nearly 25% of Earth's bird species have gone extinct in the last two thousand years [1].
Consequently, society is coming to realize that ecosystem services are not only threatened and limited, but that the pressure to evaluate trade-offs between immediate and long-term human needs is urgent. To
help inform decision-makers, economic value is increasingly associated with many ecosystem services and often based on the cost of replacement with anthropogenically-driven alternatives. The on-going challenge of prescribing economic value to nature is prompting transdisciplinary shifts in how we recognize and manage the environment, social responsibility, business opportunities, and our future as a species.
The ecosystems services approach has been systematically applied by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [MA], an international effort involving the cooperative work of more than 1,360 experts worldwide, from 2000 to 2005, which I wrote about in my recent diary, "Two Long Recessions". Not only did the MA assess the current worldwide, they also studied future prospects, employing four distinctly different scenarios, two of which were quite dismal, while two were much more promising. I wrote an Earth Day article for Random Lengths News about the MA in 2005. Here is an excerpt:
The MA found that 15 of 24 ecosystem services studied "are being degraded or used unsustainably, including fresh water, capture fisheries, air and water purification, and the regulation of regional and local climate, natural hazards, and pests." These changes are "increasing the likelihood of nonlinear changes in ecosystems (including accelerating, abrupt, and potentially irreversible changes)" such as "disease emergence, abrupt alterations in water quality, the creation of 'dead zones' in coastal waters, the collapse of fisheries, and shifts in regional climate."
The MA also found that harmful effects "are being borne disproportionately by the poor... contributing to growing inequities and disparities across groups of people," which "are sometimes the principal factor causing poverty and social conflict."
"There's no marketplace on some of those services. We regard them as free, simply because there's no market," said Stanford biologist Harold A. Mooney, one of the MA's lead authors. As a result, Mooney told Random Lengths, "You could cut down the whole forest," without paying for the regulatory services lost.
"About 4.6 billion people depend for all or some of their water on supplies from forest systems," the MA notes, but 25 countries have effectively lost all their forests, while another 29 have lost 90% of them.
The MA also cited examples of "promising and effective responses," which can avoid the problem of enhancing one service while damaging others. These ranged from removal of agricultural subsidies with "adverse economic, social, and environmental effects," to "payments for ecosystem services provided by watersheds."
"One of our solutions is to value systems appropriately," Mooney explained.
What makes the MA unique, Mooney said was "the structure of the inquiry, how we looked for the information, what concepts we put it into." An ordinary environmental assessment might examine forest cover or water pollution as isolated concerns, but with the MA, Mooney explained, "We tried to look at all of those resources simultaneously: water, forest, bio-diversity, etc. so we could examine the tradeoffs." In short, "Ecosystems were the unit of study. What we looked at specifically was what the ecosystem services were."
A second major difference Mooney cited was the focus at three distinct levels-global, sub-global and local-all "looked at with the same lens," which included "what the present status is, how it's changed, how it looks to the future, and what to do about it." The reason for the multi-level approach was simple: "We have to have the right answers at all levels."
Too often, attempts at global modeling in any field ignore the specific. But "A lot of decisions are made at the local level," Mooney pointed out. So the MA included studies of villages in the alto plano in Peru, as well as India.
One of the MA's most important findings is the importance of tradeoffs-the way some services are gained at the expense of others.
"Society is not structured in such a way to deal with such issues [as tradeoffs]. We have a Department of Agriculture, a Department of Interior, a Department of Commerce, a Department of the Treasury. You can't do the tradeoffs. The institutions we evolved evolved in different era. We need a new way of doing business."
With the expanded awareness of how many different environmental services are out there, the standard environmental impact report process seems antiquated at best. Does it need to be revamped? "Absolutely," Mooney said.
Here's are a chart from the MA report that I've posted here before:
Creating the MA report took an enormous amount of organization, energy and expertise. Yet, while it undoubtedly has provided a great deal of value for those working in the field, both scientists and policy-makers, it has had virtually no impact on public consciousness, at least in the US. There was, quite simply, no thought given to how these findings might entire into and help shape the broader public "marketplace" (or, more accurately, battleground) of ideas.
The right never works this way. It figures out its message, then goes out and concocts evidence to fit its message. Of course I'm not advocating that we should do the same. But we should be devoting substantially more resources to popular dissemination of the information and ideas that we do have. How much more? Something on the order of $300,000,000 a year seems like a good minimum. That's just off the top of my head, but it gives you an idea of how big I think we need to think.
Before moving on with Joe's list, I have something more to say about the last item in the group just refered to:
We all own the air. It is our right to have it clean. Companies have been damaging our air without paying the full cost of doing business. This has to change if we are to survive, let alone thrive. The environment is inherently valuable because it is a source of wealth (as the basis of our well-being). Companies should pay for damage to this collective wealth. This is the fair thing to do.
In addition to the ecosystems services approach, there's another conceptual approach that's relevant here, one that comes from within economics: externalized costs. Externalized costs (or benefits) are costs (or benefits) from an economic activity affecting people who are not direct parties to that activity. The unpaid use of ecosystem services are a form of externality imposed on the ecosystem. But we can also look at externalized costs simply in terms of how they impact people. Externalized costs are one form of Market failure, which Wikipedia explains thus:
Market failure is a term used by economists to describe the condition where the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient. Market failure can be viewed as a scenario in which individuals' pursuit of self-interest leads to bad results for society as a whole.[1] The first known use of the term by economists was in 1958,[2] but the concept has been traced back to the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick.
In my diary, "Market Realism vs. Market Fundamentalism", I republished an article I wrote for Random Lengths News about a labor/environmental linkage in the efforts to clean up pollution at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which involves the concepts of externalities and market failure. Here is the beginning of that article:
| Truckers Status Key | | To Clean Air, Study Finds | Employee Status for Truckers Is Key To Realizing Multiple Pollution-Reducing and Cost-Reducing Efficiencies
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor |
Less than a week after the Port of Long Beach (POLB) hastily approved an altered "Clean Trucks Program" (CTP) without mandating employee status for truckers, a new report from Beacon Economics, funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, underscored the crucial importance of the measures POLB abandoned. While not perfect, the report found the original CTP would be "very effective," significantly outperforming two alternatives.
"The employment relationship is an essential element in creating incentives to use trucks efficiently and keep them well maintained," Beacon said in a press statement.
In sharp contrast to POLB's exclusive focus on truck technology, Beacon paid intense attention to how trucks are used, how the current market incentives came about, and how a different set of incentives could move the market rapidly toward a much more efficient and less polluting state.
Lead author Jon Haveman-co-author of a landmark 2004 study, "California's Global Gateways"-is a strong believer in markets, but is highly sensitive to how they can fail, and eager to correct them when they do.
The report describes port pollution as "a classic externality problem." Haveman explained, "An externality occurs any time there is an economic activity which impacts people who aren't directly involved in that transaction." Area residents dying from diesel pollution are an extreme example.
The trucking industry has a related problem-those at the heart of the market, the truckers, are powerless to express their strong preference for increased efficiency.
The truckers' powerlessness "is part and parcel of the pollution problem," Haveman added. "Solving the efficiency problem is one important step for solving the pollution problem. If the pollution problem were internalized, there would be a much stronger movement toward reducing those inefficiencies."
Increased efficiencies could produce multiple, substantial benefits, Beacon found.
"There is enormous scope for reducing the size of the fleet," Haveman said. While a current fleet of about 16,800 trucks, Haveman couldn't project a precise figure, but said, "It could be 8,000, it might only reduce to 12,000" from the current level. This could cut the total cost of the trucks by 25 to 50 percent and/or allow for a higher percentage of cleaner, but more expensive non-diesel trucks.
Over the years, our newspaper's coverage of such issues has helped to shape a new, broader public understanding. But we only cover a small part of Los Angeles. Still, change in public understanding has been fundamental to producing policy change, and we have helped contribute to that. Imagine if we had a national media infrastructure devoted to doing the same.
Returning to Joe's list of ideas:
Wealth is well-being. This includes the empowerment that comes with monetary wealth, but it is significantly broader: emotional and physical health, having good friends, living in a flourishing community, etc. All of these are forms of wealth because they increase our well-being.
This reflects a broader version of an approach I also wrote about in "Two Long Recessions", that seeks to find better measures of economic well-being than GDP. One such measure is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which I also wrote about in "Republicans Are BAD For The Economy". Here is description of the GPI, from the think tank, " Redefining Progress":
How We Measure Progress
The GPI starts with the same personal consumption data that the GDP is based on, but then makes some crucial distinctions. It adjusts for factors such as income distribution, adds factors such as the value of household and volunteer work, and subtracts factors such as the costs of crime and pollution.
Because the GDP and the GPI are both measured in monetary terms, they can be compared on the same scale. Measurements that make up the GPI include:
Income Distribution
Both economic theory and common sense tell us that the poor benefit more from a given increase in their income than do the rich. Accordingly, the GPI rises when the poor receive a larger percentage of national income, and falls when their share decreases.
Housework, Volunteering, and Higher Education
Much of the most important work in society is done in household and community settings: childcare, home repairs, volunteer work, and so on. The GDP ignores these contributions because no money changes hands. The GPI includes the value of this work figured at the approximate cost of hiring someone to do it. The GPI also takes into account the non-market benefits associated with a more educated population.
Crime
Crime imposes large economic costs on individuals and society in the form of legal fees, medical expenses, damage to property, and the like. The GDP treats such expenses as additions to well-being. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs arising from crime.
Resource Depletion
If today's economic activity depletes the physical resource base available for tomorrow, then it is not creating well-being; rather, it is borrowing it from future generations. The GDP counts such borrowing as current income. The GPI, by contrast, counts the depletion or degradation of wetlands, forests, farmland, and nonrenewable minerals (including oil) as a current cost.
Pollution
The GDP often counts pollution as a double gain: Once when it is created, and then again when it is cleaned up. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs of air and water pollution as measured by actual damage to human health and the environment.
Long-Term Environmental Damage
Climate change, ozone depletion, and nuclear waste management are long-term costs arising from the use of fossil fuels, chlorofluorocarbons, and atomic energy, respectively. These costs are unaccounted for in ordinary economic indicators. The GPI treats as costs the consumption of certain forms of energy and of ozone-depleting chemicals. It also assigns a cost to carbon emissions to account for the catastrophic economic, environmental, and social effects of global warming.
Changes in Leisure Time
As a nation becomes wealthier, people should have more latitude to choose between work and free time for family or other activities. In recent years, however, the opposite has occurred. The GDP ignores this loss of free time, but the GPI treats leisure as most Americans do-as something of value. When leisure
time increases, the GPI goes up; when Americans have less of it, the GPI goes down.
Defensive Expenditures
The GDP counts as additions to well-being the money people spend to prevent erosion in their quality of life or to compensate for misfortunes of various kinds. Examples are the medical and repair bills from automobile accidents, commuting costs, and household expenditures on pollution control devices such
as water filters. The GPI counts such "defensive" expenditures as most Americans do: as costs rather than as benefits.
Lifespan of Consumer Durables & Public Infrastructure
The GDP confuses the value provided by major consumer purchases (e.g., home appliances) with the amount Americans spend to buy them. This hides the loss in well-being that results when products wear out quickly. The GPI treats the money spent on capital items as a cost, and the value of the service they provide year after year as a benefit. This applies both to private capital items and to public infrastructure, such as highways.
Dependence on Foreign Assets
If a nation allows its capital stock to decline, or if it finances consumption out of borrowed capital, it is living beyond its means. The GPI counts net additions to the capital stock as contributions to well-being, and treats money borrowed from abroad as reductions. If the borrowed money is used for investment, the negative effects are canceled out. But if the borrowed money is used to finance consumption, the GPI declines.
While the GPI does not perfectly account for all broader concept of wealth that Joe points to, it defintely captures some of it, and gets us headed in the right direction by re-grounding macro-economic measures in the underlying well-being of people. But, again, this is a concept that virtually no one in America has ever heard of. And again, the solution, ultimately, is to massively invest in the infrastructure needed to get our ideas out.
Finally, there are these last ideas from Joe's list:
Markets are tools for achieving societal goals. Markets must serve our purposes. We construct them to do so. Solving the climate crisis is not a matter of "waiting for the market." It is a matter of shaping markets so that they generate wealth in the broad sense.
Government makes markets possible. Markets cannot function without rules of operation, courts to enforce those rules, banks to secure financial transactions, stock markets to manage the exchanges, and more. All of these features come from government. It is ironic that conservatives talk about shrinking government, but they never mention these functions. This is because conservatives fundamentally do not understand how markets work! Their worldview makes them blind to it.
I do not have specific, compact bodies of ideas to refer to with respect to these points. To the contrary, there are many different sources of thought that support them. In this case, what is missing is simply a public conversation-or, rather, two of them. One about the conscious shaping of markets to meet human needs, the other is about government's role in making markets possible at all. And again, the way to ensure that such conversations take place is to create the instutional infrastructure to support them-the intellectual infrastructure to develop the ideas, and the media infrastructure for publicly discussing them.
In conclusion, Joe writes:
We know the facts. Hell, we knew them all along. But our facts only make sense when people understand what is really going on. We need a new common sense.
Indeed. One of the simplest ways of explaining the concept of hegemony is "ideology in drag as common sense."
|
STATE BLOGS
