There are political and business leaders who do not care if economic growth causes environmental damage and there are environmental advocates who do not believe you can have economic growth without causing environmental damage. In a New York Times piece on the climate and economics discussions at Davos, Mark Landler and Somini Sengupta reported that:
“Critics pointed to a contradiction that they said the corporate world had been unable to resolve: how to assuage the appetite for economic growth, based on gross domestic product, with the urgent need to check carbon emissions. “It’s truly a contradiction,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It’s difficult to see if the current G.D.P.-based model of economic growth can go hand-in-hand with rapid cutting of emissions,” he said.”
I find this dialogue a little amazing since it completely ignores the history of America’s success in decoupling the growth of GDP and the growth of environmental pollution. This fact of American environmental and economic life began around 1980, a decade after the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and continues today. It’s really quite simple: with public policies ranging from command-and-control regulations to direct and indirect government subsidies, businesses and governments developed and applied technologies that reduced pollution while allowing continued economic growth. This is not a fantasy, it is history. In the 1960s you could not see the mountains from downtown Los Angeles; today you can. In the 1960s you could not ride a bike on a path next to the Hudson River; today you can. Until 1985, we New Yorkers dumped raw sewage into the Hudson River. Today, with rare exceptions, we treat our sewage waste. And both Los Angeles and New York City have larger economies in 2020 than they had in 1980. In case you believe this progress was due to deindustrialization, the two largest sources of air pollution are power plants and motor vehicles and we have many more of them today than we had in 1980. Both utilize pollution control technology required by regulation under the law.
Environmental protection itself contributes to economic growth. Somebody makes and sells the air pollution control technologies we put on power plants and motor vehicles. Somebody builds the sewage and water treatment facilities. Just as someone makes money off of solar cells and windmills and whoever invents the 1,000-mile high capacity battery that will power electric cars someday will become very, very rich. And environmental amenities are worth money. The cleaner Hudson made the waterfront more suitable for housing development. And the building boom on New York’s west side followed the clean-up of the Hudson River. An apartment across the street from a park will bring a higher price than the same apartment a block away. The revival of New York’s Central Park raised the value of the already high-end real estate bordering the park. Clean air and water, healthy food and preserved nature all benefit human health and result in far more economic benefit than economic cost.
The climate problem is not caused by economic growth, but by the absence of effective public policy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is nothing incompatible with capitalism and environmental protection as long as rules are in place that control the environmental impacts of the products and services we make and use. With those rules in place, a concern for environmental sustainability can and will permeate everyday decision-making in the private, nonprofit and governmental organizations we all benefit from.
I’ve written often about the evolution of the field of management over the past century or so and that a concern for sustainability is the newest trend in the development of more sophisticated organizational management. In the 20th century, we saw the field of management absorb the development of mass production, social psychology, accounting, information management, satellite and cellular communications, globalization and now a concern for the physical dimensions of environmental sustainability. Sustainability managers continue to lead an organization’s marketing, strategy, finance and work processes but they also seek to assess their use of energy, water and other materials and work to reduce waste and environmental impacts. Just as finance staff, reinforced by the Security and Exchange Commission rules learned to identify and reduce self-dealing, conflict of interest and fraud; sustainability staff reinforced by EPA rules look to identify and reduce organizational practices that damage the environment.
On the production side, organizational managers work to increase environmental sustainability, but on the consumption side, consumers are not only buying green but changing patterns of consumption that also help reduce environmental damage. Going to a gym, riding a bike or eating a salad are all activities that add to the GDP. But so does taking your private jet to your ski lodge, driving in your SUV to the ski slopes, and eating a steak. All consumption behaviors are not created equal and do not have the same impact on environmental sustainability. More sustainable lifestyles are emerging and they can be detected in consumption patterns. For example, young Americans seem less interested in owning cars than their older siblings and parents did. Ride-sharing, bike sharing and other transit options have become feasible due to the development of the smartphone. But sitting in an Uber or driving your own car are both economic activities that are counted in the GDP.
These consumption trends are more influenced by changing cultural norms than by public policy, and typically should not be subjects of policymaking. Exceptions might include consumption that has a direct negative impact on others such as driving while intoxicated or smoking in a public space. The environmental impact of consumption can also be reduced by new technologies. For example, streaming music and video has far less environmental impact than videos and discs that used to be manufactured, packaged and shipped before they were used.
It is ironic that some environmentalists along with some climate deniers share the belief that we must trade off economic growth and environmental protection. We can and must accomplish both. A reason that we cannot abandon economic development is that most people in the developed world like the way they live and will not give up their way of life. Asking them to do so dooms environmental advocates to political marginalization and failure. Due to the internet, even very poor people in the developing world see the way we live here, want it, and are demanding that their political regimes help them achieve their dreams. The absence of economic development leads to political instability and the potential for violence. Climate scientists often mention the impact of climate change on political instability and the phenomenon of climate refugees is well documented. But the path to climate mitigation is not through slower economic growth, but through economic growth that is steered toward environmental sustainability and away from gratuitous environmental destruction.
One of the first sustainability books I ever read was Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature. McHarg developed cluster development as an alternative to suburban sprawl. The idea was that rather than providing every home with a quarter acre of land and their own large yard, you would build the housing in the one area of the building site that would cause the least damage to natural drainage and eco-systems and preserve the rest of the land as a parkland for hiking and viewing. It turned out that most of the outdoor access people used in their homes was on their patios, and that suburban yards were not simply ecological disasters, but a burdensome waste for most homeowners. (This past June a wonderful piece summarizing McHarg’s ideas and influence appeared on the City Lab website and it is well worth reading.) McHarg demonstrated that with care, humans could build urban developments that might minimize rather than maximize environmental damage.
Sloppy management, the hunger for easy money and short-term profits, and ideological rigidity lead some to believe the environment must be sacrificed for economic growth. The belief that capitalism is evil and inevitably causes environmental destruction leads others to believe that sustainable economic development is not feasible. My view is that with enlightened design, sustainability management and cutting-edge technology we can harness human ingenuity to the practical problems of environmentally sustainable economic development. We can build and live in sustainable cities and end the climate and ecological crises that seem so overwhelming today.
Steve, I so appreciate you perspective and using hiding in plain sight history to debunk conventional wisdom.
Can we really reduce resource extraction and pollution (including carbon) and maintain growth as currently measured by gross GDP? Renewable energy needed to replace existing consumption is itself a mass industrialisation operation. If the measure of growth was shifted to well-being, and energy and resource consumption were curtailed, and as you point out radical rational approaches to efficiency were implemented by regulations (driven by well-being measures) then I find it easier to imagine.
I think you are missing one important part of the criticism that capitalism is facing, that is income gap not only within the borders but outside the national borders. Income gap is one of the leading reasons for excessive consumption by some people. Most supporters of capitalism seem to stand against this idea. There is another issue of unfair trade policies and I don’t see most capitalist/ industrialized countries taking any clear stand on this issue in the near future. It also does not help that we keep refusing to acknowledge some quite dire problems capitalism has created that directly led to unsustainable habits. I don’t know whether the solution is reformed capitalism or some other economic system but the first step is not to deny some very fundamental issues with the current system and I will give you hint – look from the perspective of the most underprivileged because without that you are just speaking to your bubble.
Very well said. Often wondering whether it is possible to reform capitalism?
It seems to me that the US simply moved its pollution and production-based emissions elsewhere, such as China. If a US-based company moves its dirty factory to China, then it magically becomes “Chinese pollution” rather than “US pollution.” It’s a neat trick, but let’s not pat ourselves on the back. (We see the same bait and switch tactic used with carbon emissions.)
The point is that, in a global economy, it is incorrect to think in terms of any single country in isolation. The environmental impact of the US economy must be properly accounted by tracing everything we consume all the way back to the extraction of raw resources (e.g., mining, pumping) and every intermediate refinement, production, cultivation, assembly, transport, and processing step along the way…in ALL of the places in the world where it occurs. If such an accounting were made, I can imagine that the US environmental footprint in the world has never stopped growing, even if our own neighborhood is cleaner.
So right you are. That’s exactly what’s been happening. I did a formal analysis of the money flows that result from anyone spending or saving their incomes, which showed that pays for such global distribution, spending or saving any income source will pay for an average share per $ of the world economy’s ever faster increasing impacts on humanity and nature. It’s scope-4 impact accounting. If we had a non-growing economy we could slowly reduce its impacts with simplification and efficiency, but not a growing one.
It seems to me that the US simply moved its pollution and production-based emissions elsewhere, such as China. If a US-based company moves its dirty factory to China, then it magically becomes “Chinese pollution” rather than “US pollution.” It’s a neat trick, but let’s not pat ourselves on the back. (We see the same bait and switch tactic used with carbon emissions.)
The point is that, in a global economy, it is incorrect to think in terms of any single country in isolation. The environmental impact of the US economy must be properly accounted by tracing everything we consume all the way back to the extraction of raw resources (e.g., mining, oil pumping) and every intermediate refinement, production, cultivation, assembly, transport, and processing step along the way…in ALL of the places in the world where it occurs.
how countries of the Global South can achieve economic development whilst maintaining environmental integrity for future generations.
The problem not addressed in any way by the UN’s SDGs is the global south being massively outcompeted by the global north. I was there, in the room with the UN’s Open Working Group, closely observing as much as I could of the reasons for that enormous act of good will and effort being ,sadly, designed not to work.
It was a well intended inept heroic effort severely misled by the financial rules having been blindly designed to sustain finance, quite literally, perhaps by accident, but definitely not to sustain the earth as a good home, or even to avoid bankrupting finance.
The root problem is that growth ALWAYS forces a whole system redesign, the ‘easy’ way seen every day in how growth of new things changes purposes, from multiplying to maturing what grew. Unfortunately capitalism is designed never to do that, thus accepts unending series of ever bigger crashes. Not a good design. Keynes himself went to a lot of effort to explain why we’d run into our present existential crisis, too. Nobody listenened, just hired advisors who’d tell them what they wanted to hear!
The “climate crisis” is just the most obvious existential risk threatening the “ecosystem services” on which our civilization depends. If our nonstop growth-addicted capitalist economy were a species, then the climate crisis would be what ecologists call a “limiting factor”. It happens to be the most dire but it certainly isn’t the only existential threat to ecosystem services that support our civilization. If we magically fix climate, but fail to kick the nonstop growth addiction habit, then we will exploit the earth’s systems until some other limiting factor threatens to bring down civilization. This is really quite simple. We don’t know how to do capitalism without growth, but in a finite system anything that grows nonstop and forever will kill the host. Part of me feels like us advocates of some sort of “steady state” economy are like reformers urging chain smokers to quit cold turkey. And the nonstop “green” growth advocates tell the smokers they can puff away if they switch to low tar while calling us shills for Big Tobacco. It might be hard to get away from economic growth, and it might be impossible. But as Sarek said to Spock in the Trek reboot, “What is necessary is NEVER unwise.”
There’s no reason why a green revolution shouldn’t create countless jobs. I suspect paid scaremongering propaganda backed by fossil fuel companies has created a false dichotomy. Directing our resources towards repairing our damaged environment, eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and redirecting those subsidies towards clean energy and all the jobs that would go with it seems like a win win solution.
As a concerned fourteen-year-old, I believe we have to digress from making this a political issue. It is at its heart a choice between life or death. Economic growth won’t matter when all that’s left on Earth are dust storms, heat, and a few lucky survivors. It’s our choice to make, and there is only one correct answer to this issue: go renewable or face the consequences.
Mr. Cohen cites lots of facts. but in the end, climate change(planet pollution) is getting worse. Either that, or the climatologists are all wrong.
Decoupling is a dangerous fairy tale fo promote.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164733
Thank you. This is a counter to the hand-waving piece above.
How about the consequences of economic development processes to the sustainability of natural resources
Both developing and underdeveloped countries have left out the issue of climate change action as they all fail to provide enabling conditions for policy implementation.
Land reform policies, industrialisation policies and the use of weapons of mass destruction planned wars that appear more economical than political have grievously affected the environment.
Policies sound better during international conferences but their implementation and evaluation remain peripheral to the direct beneficiaries—an outcry to community engagement for policy implementation.
I really needed this for a article I was writing. I wanted to see others perspective. Thank you 🙂
I also like all the reasonings you put. You backup what you have said. All the other articles I’ve been to don’t really specify.
Dude, this is a baldface lie, and it is typical of the level of denial about how the normal operation of any economy akin to what we have thrives on producing endless energy consumming revenue streams of increasingly false value. There is no way to grow MATERIAL production, creating new things while perfectly serviceable older things go to the trash by denied design, I see this every damn day, we lie about, lie, lie, lie, this is madness, anyone who failes to confront the problem of waste and growth and value emptiness is both deluded and furthering the problem, we are drowning in unneeded luxury and convenience and we are worsening our plight furthering the status quo, we seem hell bent on collapse by now. THIS IS A PATENT FALSEHOOD: :”The climate problem is not caused by economic growth, but by the absence of effective public policy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Dude, we need to cosume less energy per capita and globally, nothing less will mitigate a thing, why ar\re people so deluded about what we really need to do here, this is AUTO-BIOCIDE by now!!!
yes king
Casting aspersions in defense of magical production with ever shrinking consumption really doesn’t help clarify the problem. Just check the long term atmospheric CO2 curve showing climate forcing growing exponentially in constant proportion to GDP. Yes, that is partly a sign of ever increasing unit efficiencies, however also demonstrates how increasing unit efficiencies accelerate the growth of resource uses and impacts.
I am very disappointed that ten years after the false argument that efficiency reduces impacts was firmly settled that the popularity of that major error is coming up again. You have to rely on real science not pleasing social banter if we’re ever to get out of our all having fallen into the trap created by a financial system designed for its profits growing by ever bigger steps to infinity. That doesn’t work. Problems have already come up with driving all the physical processes the same way to produce the growth in the figures. Haven’t you noticed??
Jessie Lydia Henshaw