Endangered Economies

How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity

Geoffrey Heal

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231543286
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Desarrollo sostenible

In the decades since Geoffrey Heal began his field-defining work in environmental economics, one central question has animated his research: "Can we save our environment and grow our economy?" This issue has become only more urgent in recent years with the threat of climate change, the accelerating loss of ecosystems, and the rapid industrialization of the developing world. Reflecting on a lifetime of experience not only as a leading voice in the field, but as a green entrepreneur, activist, and advisor to governments and global organizations, Heal clearly and passionately demonstrates that the only way to achieve long-term economic growth is to protect our environment.

Writing both to those conversant in economics and to those encountering these ideas for the first time, Heal begins with familiar concepts, like the tragedy of the commons and unregulated pollution, to demonstrate the underlying tensions that have compromised our planet, damaging and in many cases devastating our natural world. Such destruction has dire consequences not only for us and the environment but also for businesses, which often vastly underestimate their reliance on unpriced natural benefits like pollination, the water cycle, marine and forest ecosystems, and more. After painting a stark and unsettling picture of our current quandary, Heal outlines simple solutions that have already proven effective in conserving nature and boosting economic growth. In order to ensure a prosperous future for humanity, we must understand how environment and economy interact and how they can work in harmony—lest we permanently harm both.

1

ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMY—NO CONFLICT

I’ve gradually noticed the natural world disappearing, being destroyed bit by bit: woodlands vanishing, birds and butterflies that I knew in my youth ever harder to find, wildflowers rarer and rarer. Hard and depressing statistics confirm these subjective impressions on the vanishing natural world and the increasingly tenuous life of many species. The experience of my friend and colleague Don Melnick, a professor of ecology, emphasizes this point: having spent much of his career studying orangutans, he realized the population of these amazing great apes was crashing, and that unless he and others acted, the species to which he has devoted his life would be extinct.

The collapse of the natural world has always struck me as a tragic loss, but it took me many years to make the connection to my own profession, economics. I saw that economics itself—economic activity, peoples’ need to make a living, to farm, to build homes—was driving the collapse of the natural world. But I also saw that economics could restore the natural world to some of its past grandeur. The reason is simple, though perhaps surprising in a world where we have been told to think of the environment as luxury: We need the natural world. We depend on it, and without it, our prosperity is illusory.

Economics is about the efficient use of scarce resources, and much of what nature provides us is scarce and important—air to breathe, water to drink, a productive climate, and food to eat. We need to think economically about these now scarce but vital natural assets—the remaining chapters show how to do just that.

The prosperity of any country is bound up with the health of its natural environment. National economies are linked in a complex dance with the forests, aquifers, coastlines and oceans, beetles and birds, and teeming life above and below the earth’s surface. A web of intricate relationships between very different worlds links business and beehives, productivity and pollution, food and fisheries. Largely unwatched and unbidden, our economic world and Mother Nature’s world silently collide to determine our economic fortune. Though not widely understood or appreciated, nature’s contribution to economic success is enormous.

Examples of nature’s contributions abound. Nature adds economic value through pollination by insects, birds, and bats. Pollination is essential to agriculture—about one-third of our food would not be produced without it. Nature adds economic value through increased agricultural productivity from higher-yielding crops derived from other naturally occurring plant varieties. Nature adds economic value through watersheds and aquifers, providing direct benefits to agriculture and industries dependent on clean water. Nature adds economic value through hydropower, one of the cleanest and most reliable sources of electricity.

We can destroy economic value by damaging the environment, and in the process harm the health of our citizens and diminish their productivity. A striking illustration comes from California, one of the richest regions in the world, whose prosperity is based on technology (Silicon Valley), entertainment (Hollywood), and high-value agriculture (wine, fruit, and vegetables). A recent study shows that higher concentrations of ground-level ozone pollution reduce the amount of fruit and vegetables picked per hour by agricultural workers: more ozone makes it more difficult for workers to breathe and reduces their productivity noticeably.¹

The effect of ozone on the productivity of agricultural workers is not just an economic loss—ozone’s effect on their breathing makes attacks of asthma more likely, and the incidence of heart attacks greater at times of high ozone concentrations. Many people around the world are forced to lead substandard lives, to live in pain and distress, and to attain far less than their potential because of pollution’s effects on their health. A recent study by economist Michael Greenstone and colleagues drives this point home, suggesting that in the more heavily polluted areas of China, pollution from burning coal reduces life expectancy by five and a half years.² That 7 to 8 percent reduction in a person’s lifespan from coal pollution comes with huge attendant losses—both human, and by extension, economic.

The examples above show the adverse effects of pollution on health. In contrast, we can see what the gains from a greener, more environmentally friendly economy are on the macroeconomy in a concept explored by the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Olivier Blanchard, and Spanish economist Jordi Gali.³ In the 1970s, as in the era around 2000, oil prices were volatile, varying by a factor of ten. In the 1970s prices ranged from $3 per barrel to $36, and between 1997 and 2011 they ranged from $10 to $145. In the 1970s, the sudden tenfold rise in the price of oil led to recession and inflation in most oil-consuming countries, yet in the 2000s an even bigger rise did not. Blanchard and Gali set out to find out why. They argue that a big part of the answer is that between the 1970s and the end of the century, industrial economies greatly improved the efficiency of their energy use. As a consequence, the amount of oil used to produce a typical unit of output fell, and big changes in oil prices came to matter less. A policy driven by an interest in using natural resources more efficiently led to a more stable economy, one more robust to the vicissitudes of international markets.

In spite of the inextricable bond between ourselves, our economy, and our environment, we are damaging the natural world, undermining the foundations of our economic success. National economies cannot succeed without a thriving natural environment. So what is the source of this conflict between economy and environment? In short, the conflict arises from market failures—from correctable shortcomings of the market system that constitutes our principal tool for organizing economic activity and is our main mechanism for deciding what is made, how it’s made, and who consumes it.

The market is a wonderful institution. It is one of society’s most amazing inventions and it contributes hugely to our economic well-being. Yet with markets designed and run by humans, it’s surely no surprise to a generation who has lived through an Internet bubble, a housing bubble, and then a financial crisis that the markets occasionally and inevitably will err. The upside is that these market errors are easily corrected, and in doing so the fixes can increase prosperity and make it more sustainable. I explore this idea in the chapters that follow by looking at: the failings of the market from an environmental perspective, how to alter our economic policies and institutions to fix them, and why this will make us better off. I don’t just want to explain what is wrong, but also how to fix the problems. The point, as Karl Marx once explained, is not merely to understand the world but to change it for the better.

What are the flaws in the market system causing it to despoil the natural world, and how can they be corrected to produce a new economic model more respectful of nature? The central idea is simple: it is to ensure that people and firms both see and pay the full costs of their choices, and that their incentives are aligned with the social good. The economic system must make us aware of and liable for all the consequences of our choices, regardless of who or what those consequences fall upon. If we can teach our kids to clean up after themselves, and ideally not to make a mess in the first place, we need to abide by the same principle in the treatment of our world.

To put this another way: the key is full cost accounting, recognizing all the costs of an activity and ensuring that they are all charged to the person or firm carrying it out. This sounds technical and nerdy, reasonable not revolutionary. And it is reasonable—indeed, it is actually the way a market economy is supposed to work. However, we have strayed far from Adam Smith’s ideal competitive economy, and this simple idea of full cost accounting has far-reaching implications and can in fact revolutionize the relationship between humans and nature.

Adam Smith invented the beautiful metaphor of the invisible hand, a process that guides our economic choices so that they are good not only for us individually but also for society as a whole. He argued that the market system itself is an invisible hand, reconciling the pursuit of self-interest with effective use of society’s economic resources overall. By and large his arguments have been borne out in the centuries since he wrote An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, but he did miss a few important points. Take, for instance, industrial pollution—clearly not a major issue in the pre-industrial era. Pollution compromises the dexterity of the invisible hand and its ability to manage our affairs efficiently.

Imagine you run a factory. The most obvious costs are those linked to bills you have to pay—economists call these costs of labor, materials, energy, buildings, capital, etc., private costs. These are the familiar costs that appear in the factory’s accounts, in its income statement under “cost of goods sold” and under various types of overhead costs. There’s another type of cost associated with operating the factory that doesn’t fall on the owner but is borne instead by people who may have no connection with it—these are the consequences of your actions for third parties, or external costs. If the factory pollutes the air, the cost of dirty air is borne by everyone who breathes it. I am stretching the word cost a little here—these are not cash costs, but costs in terms of illness, inconvenience, pain and suffering, and lost productivity. They resemble the costs incurred by the California fruit pickers or the residents of polluted Chinese cities. Likewise, if a factory pollutes a river, then anyone downstream who used to have clean water and now doesn’t faces a cost of the same type. And if the factory emits greenhouse gases, the global climate changes and everyone on the earth is affected. The processes that generate external costs are called external effects, so in the language of economists, pollution is an external effect leading to an external cost.

On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, operating in the Gulf of Mexico on behalf of the giant oil company BP, killed eleven rig operators and led oil to burst out of the Macondo well. The oil reached the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida and the leak lasted for 86 days—until July 15—when the well was finally capped. In that time, 210 million gallons of oil spilled into the ocean—endangering not only the surrounding coastal beach and marshy bay ecosystems and the fish and birds living in them—but also the livelihoods of shrimp fishermen and all those who relied on tourism in the Gulf area.

This spill is a clear example of the externalization of costs. Some of the costs of oil drilling were imposed on the Gulf community, the fishermen, restaurant owners, hoteliers, and their customers. The consequences of bad choices by BP and its associates were felt not only by them but by millions of other individuals and businesses. But there is an unusual twist to this example: In economic jargon, costs were internalized. The effects from the oil spill changed from being external costs felt by the individuals and businesses into regular costs to BP and its shareholders. BP’s stock market value fell by about $30 billion, roughly the cost of correcting the damages from the leak, because traders expected that BP would have to compensate fully those who were damaged by its actions.⁴ This cost was borne by BP’s shareholders, who include its employees and many investors, among them most major pension funds. The stock market’s expectations were correct: BP did have to pay compensation and penalties of more than $20 billion.

What happened to BP was an exception, an implementation of the idea that polluters should pay for the damages they create. Generally, the costs of an action—running a factory, cutting a forest, using a car, drilling for oil—are not all paid by the person carrying it out. Significant costs—external costs—fall on third parties, and this has an important consequence: It is the main reason we suffer from pollution. If everyone always had to pay all of the costs of an action themselves, including external costs, we would see far less polluting behavior: utilities would burn less coal, individuals would burn less gasoline in their cars, and oil companies would be far more careful about oil leaks.

To redress this imbalance, the countries of the European Union adopted the “polluter pays” principle as a foundation for environmental law. By requiring polluters to pay for the damages they impose on others, these countries are trying to make firms aware that they will be liable for the external costs of their actions, thereby reducing polluting behavior.

The stock market imposed on BP the external costs for which traders anticipated BP would eventually be held liable. If we want to make the market economy greener, we have to act exactly as the stock market did. We must adopt the polluter pays principle and, in economic jargon, internalize all external costs. Firms and individuals have to pay for the full costs, and not just the private costs, of their actions. This is a key step in enabling the economy to efficiently manage the insults the industrial world imposes on the natural. Currently, we are subsidizing polluters by passing along external costs to the rest of society, and we need to kick this habit before it kills us. It is inequitable and inefficient.

Closely associated with the idea of external costs is another point Adam Smith missed, a point about property rights. Smith assumed, not unreasonably, that all the goods that mattered were owned by someone, and that these owners could choose to sell or not depending on whether they liked the price being offered. For capital goods like machinery and inputs like steel and electricity, this is generally true. But to see an exception, think for a moment about fish. They are clearly crucial to fishing, yet no one owns them when they are alive and swimming in the ocean. It’s only when they are dead and in the marketplace that they are considered a good to be sold. Economists call such resources common property resources.

Why does this ownership issue matter economically? It’s at the heart of what is called the “tragedy of the commons,” a condition noted (though not so named) by a nineteenth-century English economist William Forster Lloyd. He observed that the cattle grazing on common land (land to which everyone had access) were puny and stunted, whereas those on private land were better fed. Lloyd argued that overgrazing of common land clearly pointed to an error in Adam Smith’s paradigm of the invisible hand.

Fishing is similarly vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. Say a fisherman has to decide whether to fish an extra day. If he does, he incurs the costs of running his boat that day, but he will also gain in terms of extra catch. If what he will earn from this extra catch is greater than the cost, he will work the extra day. Suppose he does earn more, and he brings in a profit. That’s good for our fisherman—but there is a problem.

Where do the fish he catches come from? They come from the pool that other fishermen are fishing from, and given that the stock of fish is large but not unlimited, others will eventually and inevitably catch less. Our protagonist’s catch goes up, but his peers lose some of their profits. If everyone sees the situation the same way, if everyone sees near-term profits in fishing more at the long-term expense both of themselves and of their competitors, then the result is a waste of resources. The last boats to enter the fishery are adding little or nothing to total catch and are merely cannibalizing that of other boats.

There is a connection here with the external cost issue: When I put my boat out to sea for another day or put more cattle on the commons, I am imposing costs on others, as they will now catch fewer fish or their cattle will get less grass. This is another manifestation of external costs. It is again the case that one person’s actions have unintended consequences for others, and these consequences are external costs to be internalized.

This external cost imposed on other participants is one reason to think that the free market will overuse a common property resource, but there is another important aspect to consider: the fishery is a renewable resource. The fishery will, if given adequate time, replenish itself; if we leave adult fish in the sea, they will breed and the population will grow. The same goes, for example, for trees in a forest; if we leave young trees intact, they will grow to provide lumber for the future.

Now consider that if the renewable resource is also a common property resource, there will be no incentive to leave behind some adult fish or young trees to provide for the future. Suppose I’m a fisherman and have the choice of catching an adult fish or leaving it to breed. If I were the only user of the fishery, leaving it might make sense to me: I would reduce my present catch but ensure a catch in the future. However, if others use the fishery, I face the risk that one of them may catch the adult that I decided to leave to breed. So there is no guarantee that my sacrifice or thoughtfulness will pay off; instead, I may just be providing more money to my shortsighted competitor.

Oil wells provide a powerful (though perhaps unexpected) illustration of this point. In the 1920s, more than a thousand firms had the right to drill for and produce oil in the East Texas oil field—and between the different companies, they drilled more than ten thousand wells. They pumped oil so fast that they damaged the geological structure of the underground reservoirs, reducing the amount of oil that could ultimately be recovered from the field (an external cost imposed on all users of the field) and producing a glut of oil on the market (causing the price of oil to plummet). The reason they pumped so fast? They knew that any oil they did not take would be taken by one of their competitors. In this frenzied competition, no one had any incentive to think about the future of the field.

A possible solution to these common property problems is to ensure that all natural resources have an owner. In the case of fisheries, this means that fish are owned even before they are caught. This sounds abstract, but we’ll see ways of doing this later on that are quite sensible and intuitive.

It’s not just fisheries, forests, and underground oil reserves that are common property resources: common property resources also control many natural processes on which we are dependent, often without our knowing it. Crunching into an apple or sipping a glass of Rhône wine, you probably don’t think of the natural processes that had to occur to bring these delights to your table. Agricultural crops, as I’ve described, need pollination. They also require soil fertility, water, and favorable weather. All of these environmental inputs are more complex than they first seem: soil fertility depends on microorganisms in the soil (soil is not inert but a living community), water availability is managed by watersheds, and the climate determines if our crops receive favorable weather. Without these four environmental factors working in our favor, crops would not grow and we would starve.

Yet we don’t recognize these inputs, we don’t value them, we take them for granted. And at the same time, perhaps as a result of not recognizing them and of no one owning them, we work toward destroying them. Pesticides kill pollinating insects, and the bee population has collapsed in many Western countries.⁵ Soil erosion and chemical pollution from the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides diminishes soil fertility. Clearing forests destroys watersheds, and the climate system is changing because of our use of fossil fuels.

We will not be able to address these problems until we recognize the economic value of nature’s services (which biologists call ecosystem services). We must also recognize that these services are threatened by the rampant destruction of the natural environment, in many cases through the overuse of common property resources. To emphasize the economic importance of the natural environment, I refer to it as natural capital, because it is truly a capital asset of great importance.

An important step in revising our economic model, then, is to recognize the value of natural capital and to take this value into account in the cost of projects that will change the environment. This is full cost accounting.

Recognizing the significance of natural capital leads to new ways of assessing the economi...