Environmental Principles and Policies

An Interdisciplinary Introduction

Sharon Beder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134037339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umweltschutz

Environmental Principles and Policies uses environmental and social principles to analyse the latest wave of economic-based and market-orientated environmental policies currently being adopted around the world. This book provides an in-depth examination of six key principles that have been incorporated into international treaties and the national laws of many countries: * ecological sustainability* the polluter pays principle* the precautionary principle* equity* human rights* public participationThese principles are then used to evaluate a range of policies including pollution charges, emissions, trading, water markets, biodiversity banks and tradable fishing rights.Environmental Principles and Policies is easily accessible, using non-technical language throughout, and - in what sets it apart from other books on environmental policy-making - it takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach. It does not set out policies in a descriptive or prescriptive way, but analyses and evaluates policy options from a variety of perspectives. This enables readers to gain a thorough grasp of important principles and current policies, as well as demonstrating how principles can be used to critically assess environmental policies.

PART I

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION PRINCIPLES

1

THE SUSTAINABILITY PRINCIPLE

The idea that Earth has unlimited capacity to provide for human desires and absorb human wastes was undermined when the first pictures of the planet from outer space were published. The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, stated in 1965:

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. (quoted in Hardin 1977)

In 1966 Kenneth E Boulding (1966), a professor of economics, used the same analogy in his classic essay, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’. In it he described the actual economies of industrialised countries as ‘cowboy’ economies, ‘the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies’. He wrote of the need for a ‘spaceman’ economy which recognised the planet has limited supplies and a limited capacity to extract wastes. In this economy people would have to find their place ‘in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form’.

While a cowboy economy maximises production and consumption as desirable goals, and success is attained by continually increasing the throughput of materials and energy, a spaceman economy tries to minimise throughput in a closed economy. In such an economy the aim would be to:

• limit extraction and pollution

• decrease consumption

• continuously reproduce the material form

• increase stock maintenance – goods would be built to last as long as possible.

Economic success in a spaceman economy would be measured by the ‘nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of human bodies and minds’.

LIMITS TO GROWTH

Early warnings

In the late 1960s and early 1970s many scholars and thinkers observed that continual economic growth was causing environmental decline, and argued that it could not be sustained forever. One of the most famous studies done at this time was commissioned by the Club of Rome, which was formed in 1968 by scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists and civil servants under the leadership of Italian businessman Aurelio Peccei. The study was undertaken by a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA and published as a book called The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). The study used a computer model of the world economy to show that the existing exponential growth rates of population and economic activity could not continue indefinitely on a planet that had only limited natural resources and limited ability to deal with pollution. It found that:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. (Meadows et al. 1972: 23–4)

Although this has often been characterised as a doomsday scenario, the study was optimistic in its assertion that it ‘is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future’.

The Limits to Growth ‘made headlines around the world and began a debate about the limits of the Earth’s capacity to support human economic expansion’ (Atkisson & Davis 2001: 165). It was translated into 29 languages, and 9 million copies were sold. While the idea of limits to growth appealed to the layperson’s common sense, it ‘seriously perturbed Western intellectuals’ and angered economists, conservatives and politicians alike, who viewed any criticism of economic growth as a direct attack on capitalism. Socialists, who were also attached to economic growth as essential for progress, disliked it as well (Ekins 1992: 270; Norgaard 2001: 167; Suter 1999).

In the same year as The Limits to Growth was published, the magazine The Ecologist (Editors 1972) devoted an entire issue to arguing that economic growth could not continue into the future without disaster. Their argument was supported by 33 eminent academics. The issue was also published as a book – A Blueprint for Survival – which stated:

The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable … By now it should be clear that the main problems of the environment do not arise from temporary and accidental malfunctions of existing economic and social systems. On the contrary, they are the warning signs of a profound incompatibility between deeply rooted beliefs in continuous growth and the dawning recognition of the earth as a space ship, limited in its resources and vulnerable to thoughtless mishandling.

In 1973 economist Herman Daly (1973) published a book of papers entitled Towards a Steady-State Economy. Daly, like Boulding, argued for an economy in which the numbers of people and goods were stable and the throughputs of materials and energy were restrained.

Backlash

These publications and others unleashed a wave of controversy. There was a major counter-attack on the whole idea of limits to growth. Economists and others argued that technological change and the invisible hand of the market meant that there were no limits or, if there were limits to particular resources, humans could outsmart them by finding alternatives.

One well-known response to the limits to growth thesis was The Doomsday Syndrome by John Maddox, the editor of Nature, a leading science journal. Maddox (1972: 21–2) argued that there was no forthcoming crisis, that environmental and associated problems could be and were being fixed through legislation and through scientific and technological innovation:

Tiny though the earth may appear from the moon, it is in reality an enormous object. The atmosphere of the earth alone weighs more than 5,000 million million tons, more than a million tons of air for each human being now alive … It is not entirely out of the question that human intervention could at some stage bring changes, but for the time being the vast scale on which the earth is built should be a great comfort.

Another well-known refutation came from economist Julian Simon, professor of business administration and senior fellow at the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. Simon (1981) wrote a book entitled The Ultimate Resource, in which he argued that human resourcefulness would ensure that resources would never run out because, if a particular resource became scarce, either new sources would be discovered, people would learn to do more with less, or substitutes would be found.

A team of scientists at Sussex University re-ran the model used in The Limits to Growth but with the assumption that instead of there being absolute limits on food and resources, resources could be increased exponentially through discovery of new resources, recycling and pollution controls. Not surprisingly, they did not come up with the pessimistic results of the original model (cited in Ekins 1992: 270).

One analyst noted that neither outcome was certain, and that what separated the resource optimists from the resource pessimists was that

[the] optimist believes in the power of human inventiveness to solve whatever problems are thrown in its way, as apparently it has done in the past. The pessimist questions the success of those past technological solutions and fears that future problems may be more intractable. (Lecomber quoted in Ekins 1992: 270)

The pessimist also believes there are certain physical constraints that mean that resources cannot continue to grow exponentially, no matter how much recycling is achieved or how clever technology becomes (Ekins 1992: 272).

Complete recycling, in fact, is not possible, since some materials are always lost through wear and tear, and corrosion and energy are required to make the transformation from waste product to new product. Moreover, according to limits-to-growth advocate Ted Trainer (1985), even if the pollution generated by manufacturing could be cut by 30 per cent, this gain to the environment would be soon lost if more manufacturing was undertaken as the result of economic growth. If the manufacturing sector grew at 3 per cent per year, it would only take 13 years before there was just as much pollution as before the cuts, and 23 years for there to be twice as much.

The merits of economic growth

The debate was not only over the question of whether human ingenuity, the market and technological change could overcome the physical limits of the planet but also over the merits of economic growth. Herman Kahn (1989: 178–9), and the US Hudson Institute, argued that while economic growth might not be able to continue indefinitely, there was too much to gain from economic growth to attempt to reduce it in the shorter term:

In our view, the application of a modicum of intelligence and good management in dealing with current problems can enable economic growth to continue for a considerable period of time, to the benefit, rather than to the detriment, of mankind. We argue that without such growth the disparities among nations so regretted today would probably never be overcome, that ‘no growth’ would consign the poor to indefinite poverty and increase the present tensions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.

Economic growth was put forward as the solution to problems such as poverty: the poor would be better off as the economy grew. Without such an argument politicians would have little answer to demands for more equitable redistribution of wealth (Norgaard 2001: 167). But economic growth does not necessarily eliminate poverty. The economic growth that has occurred worldwide over the last three decades has not decreased the poverty within developing nations; and the richest nations in the world still accommodate some of the poorest people. Much poverty results from distributional problems rather than from a nation’s lack of wealth. This was already evident in 1973 when the president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, said that although the world had just experienced ten years of unprecedented economic growth, ‘the poorest segments of the population have received relatively little benefit … the upper 40 per cent of the population typically receive 75 per cent of all income’ (Sachs 1992a: 6)

The need for growth in high-income countries was even more controversial. US economists Paul Barkley and David Seckler (1972: 18) wrote that:

the more developed nations of the world have now reached a state where all reasonable and rational demands for economic goods have been or can be satisfied. As a result, the virtues of added economic growth may be an illusion because growth does not come free. In fact, the costs of added growth are climbing quite rapidly as the pressures against certain resources, and on the environment as a whole, increase. The developed countries may have reached a level at which the costs of additional growth in terms of labor and loss of environmental quality exceed the benefits …

Similarly, economist EJ Mishan (1967) argued that the costs of economic growth outweighed the benefits:

The uglification of once handsome cities the world over continues unabated. Noise levels and gas levels are still rising and, despite the erection of concrete freeways over city centres, unending processions of motorised traffic lurch through its main thoroughfares. Areas of outstanding beauty are still being sacrificed to the tourist trade and traditional communities to the exigencies of ‘development’. Pollution of air, soil and oceans spreads over the globe … The upward movement in the indicators of social disintegration – divorce, suicide, delinquency, petty theft, drug taking, sexual deviance, crime and violence – has never faltered over the last two decades. (quoted in Ekins 1992: 273)

The limits to growth debate did cause more conservative economists ‘to incorporate natural resources and pollution’ into their growth models...