Polluters' shell game: the worst polluters are hiding their minuscule contribution to the economy.

• Author: Freudenburg, William

Quick--fill in the missing word:

"environment__jobs."

For most people, the word is "versus." But that's a triumph of spin-doctoring and is seriously misleading--bad not just for environmental protection, but also for the economy. In fact, a growing body of evidence shows not just that environmental protection can be an important source of new jobs (see essay, "Meltdown or Green Deal?," p. 13), but also that many of the worst environmental problems come from facilities that contribute surprisingly little to the economy. Worst of all, at least for environmentalists, a significant part of the blame for this misunderstanding is theirs alone, growing out of accepted ways of thinking about environmental problems that are just plain wrong.

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For example, when environmental issues first came to public attention in a big way around the first Earth Day, in 1970, many environmentalists learned to worry about what Garrett Hardin called "the tragedy of the commons." Hardin was writing about shared or "common" pastures, which were once widespread in Europe. His argument was that rationally individualistic herders would all decide to add a few more sheep or cattle to the pasture, until they created the collectively irrational tragedy of ruined pastures. And it was during the 1970s that Americans learned that "we are all passengers on spaceship Earth," or as Hardin himself rephrased it, all passengers in the same lifeboat.

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A few years later, environmentalists also focused on a best-selling book, The Limits to Growth. For many, the important limits had to do with population; others focused instead on affluence. In one sense, we have gone beyond such arguments today, since most academic analysts now look at both. The problem is that population and affluence are often combined into the "I=PAT" equation, holding that environmental Impacts should equal Population times Affluence times Technology--an approach that hides the biggest pollution sources instead of highlighting them.

These ways of thinking about environmental problems are compelling and memorable, but they are also problematic. For one thing, Hardin was wrong, historically. Most common pastures were actually models of today's big environmental goal of sustainability, being managed collectively, and quite sustainably, for hundreds of years--far longer than the industrial world has survived to date. The herders who survived were no dummies; they kept each other in check. In a far larger number of cases, the "tragedy" came with what historians remember as the enclosure movement, when lawyers helped the landlords to "enclose" the formerly common pastures with walls, kicking off the poor herders whose families had been using them in the past.

The bigger problem, though, is that the common perspectives of the 1970s are wrong for today.

Small Share, Big Risk

At an overall level, IPAT thinking is "true" by definition. So long as "Technology" can be used as a statistical fudge factor, we can always make the numbers come out right. As is sometimes the case in academic debates, unfortunately, the numbers can come out right without telling us much. Although the basic assumption has long been that environmental impacts are proportionate to overall levels of economic activity, recent findings show striking levels of disproportionality between economic benefit and environmental harm. In simpler terms, much or most environmental harm actually comes from a surprisingly tiny fraction of all economic activity.

Probably the person who has done the most careful job of adding up all the numbers on resource use is the physicist-economist Robert Ayres. His most detailed analyses focus...