Eco-tragedies Depress GDP

• Pages: 24-24

Page 24 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, March/April 2009

noTice & commenT

“Governments now

have an opportunity to

create and enforce policy

which stimulates private

competition to fund clean

industry.”

— UN climate chief Yvo de

Boer, on the opportunity to

rebuild a green world nancial

system because of the credit

crunch.

is difcult. In 2006,

economist Nicholas

Stern rocked the world

by putting a £2.3 trillion

price tag on the con-

sequences of ignoring

climate change. . . .

“Stern had a huge effect

in communicating the

scale of the problem,”

says Nick Johnstone, an

economist at the OECD,

After global markets

were hit by what may

be the worst nancial

crisis of our times,

environmental groups

pointed out that an

“eco-crunch” would hit

even harder. Just how

hard is the subject of a

new report.

Estimating the cost

of enviroinmental crises

which produced the new

report: “Costs of Inac-

tion on Key Environmen-

tal Challenges.”

Johnstone and his

team compiled research

on air and water pollu-

tion, climate change,

groundwater manage-

ment, industrial hazards,

and natural disasters to

estimate the costs of

inaction for each prob-

lem. . . . Mismanaging

natural disasters costs

the poorest countries

more than 13 percent of

their GDP, for example,

and air pollution costs

China about 3.8 percent

of GDP in poor health.

— e Economist

Eco-tragedies Depress GDP

The Allure of the

Technical Fix

In a little less than a year, climate

change has gone from one of the

American public’s most compelling

challenges to dead last among the top 10

concerns, according to polls — a result

of the f‌inancial crisis. At the same time,

scientists are becoming increasingly

worried about humanity’s ef‌fect on the

biosphere. e National Academy of

Sciences says that even with emissions

cutbacks, because carbon dioxide per-

sists in the atmosphere the planet will

face “inexorable sea-level rise” and con-

ditions like the Dust Bowl for at least

one thousand years. NASA scientist

James Hansen and British economist

Sir Nicholas Stern have separately said

that capping greenhouse emissions is

not enough; there is already too much

CO2 in the atmosphere. And concerns

about the ef‌fects of greenhouse gas

emissions on the oceans have worsened,

with the United Nations calling for “ur-

gent action” to prevent a wipeout of sea

life caused by rising temperatures and

acidity.

ese trends make clear that reduc-

ing emissions is a key social imperative,

but also that society absent a crisis is

not ready to move on its own accord.

Witness in the United States how the

trend to smaller cars precipitated by the

recent rise in oil prices dissipated com-

pletely when gas fell below $2 a gallon.

e hopes of humanity in facing down

climate change evidently will depend

on improved technologies and the

policy signals that will drive consumers

toward them without rebellion.

Dramatic action may depend on

sending the right price signals. is de-

pends in turn on making greenhouse

gas emissions expensive, either through

a tax or a cap. But even at today’s prices

electricity ratepayers will respond ap-

propriately if they are aware of the

costs. In California, a utility achieved

a two percent reduction in household

energy consumption by including a

breakdown of neighborhood power

consumption in bill envelopes, printing

a smiley face if the particular customer

consumed less than the average. And

ef‌fective technology solutions won’t

necessarily be dif‌f‌icult. Two University

of Washington scientists have estimated

that “large-scale agriculture produces

enough waste worldwide that dumping

it in the ocean” — where it would sink

to the bottom, sequestering the carbon

— “could reduce the global annual ac-

cumulation of CO2 by 15 percent,”

according to the New York Times. e

researcher Clark Williams-Derry esti-

mated in the Wall Street Journal that a

cutback in mail delivery in the United

States to only f‌ive days a week “could

reduce vehicle CO2 emissions nation-

wide by as much as 700,000 tons a

year.” Technologies need not be new

to be ef‌fective in the battle against cli-

mate change. An article in Washington

Monthly concludes that “$250 to $500

billion invested in electrif‌ied rail infra-

structure would get 85 percent of long-

haul trucks of‌f the road, reduce green-

house gas emissions by 38 percent, and

grow the economy by 13 percent.”

Forcing reductions in this way with-

out public sacrif‌ice constitutes “the

allure of the technical f‌ix,” as New Sci-

entist put it in a recent editorial. “It is

a ref‌lection on the parlous state of the

planet that we report this week on tech-

nologies that not so long ago would

have been dismissed as pie in the sky,

even bonkers. Now they are increas-

ingly seen as ways to repair the dam-

age.” An example: machines that would

scrub carbon out of the air at a cost only

slightly higher than to remove carbon

from f‌lue gases. e advantage is that

such a system could make carbon se-