[saymaListserv] Does This Sound Familiar? (Relevant to the Testimony on Truth and the Proposed Testimony on Care of the Earth)

[Janet Minshall]

Dear Friends, I think this article is 
particularly timely for SAYMA Friends right now. 
It makes a point that I've been trying to make in 
messages and articles for several years, but this 
piece makes the point more clearly.  We can help 
the environment considerably more than we do by 
understanding and promoting economically sound 
proposals to fix what is broken.   We can also be 
more effective as environmentalists by checking 
our facts and being sure that what we say about 
the environment is accurate and well founded (For 
some painfully truthful discussion of commonly 
misunderstood issues read
  The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2004, by Bjorn 
Lomborg, a former Greenpeace activist). 
			 In Peace, Janet Minshall    


Environmental economics
Rescuing environmentalism
Apr 21st 2005
From The Economist print edition
Market forces could prove the environment's best 
friend-if only greens could learn to love them

"THE environmental movement's foundational 
concepts, its method for framing legislative 
proposals, and its very institutions are 
outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another 
special interest." Those damning words come not 
from any industry lobby or right-wing think-tank. 
They are drawn from "The Death of 
Environmentalism", an influential essay published 
recently by two greens with impeccable 
credentials. They claim that environmental groups 
are politically adrift and dreadfully out of 
touch.

They are right. In America, greens have suffered 
a string of defeats on high-profile issues. They 
are losing the battle to prevent oil drilling in 
Alaska's wild lands, and have failed to spark the 
public's imagination over global warming. Even 
the stridently ungreen George Bush has failed to 
galvanise the environmental movement. The 
solution, argue many elders of the sect, is to 
step back from day-to-day politics and policies 
and "energise" ordinary punters with talk of 
global-warming calamities and a radical "vision 
of the future commensurate with the magnitude of 
the crisis".

Europe's green groups, while politically 
stronger, are also starting to lose their way 
intellectually. Consider, for example, their 
invocation of the woolly "precautionary 
principle" to demonise any complex technology 
(next-generation nuclear plants, say, or 
genetically modified crops) that they do not like 
the look of. A more sensible green analysis of 
nuclear power would weigh its (very high) 
economic costs and (fairly low) safety risks 
against the important benefit of generating 
electricity with no greenhouse-gas emissions.
Small victories and bigger defeats

The coming into force of the UN's Kyoto protocol 
on climate change might seem a victory for 
Europe's greens, but it actually masks a larger 
failure. The most promising aspect of the 
treaty-its innovative use of market-based 
instruments such as carbon-emissions trading-was 
resisted tooth and nail by Europe's greens. With 
courageous exceptions, American green groups also 
remain deeply suspicious of market forces.

If environmental groups continue to reject 
pragmatic solutions and instead drift toward 
Utopian (or dystopian) visions of the future, 
they will lose the battle of ideas. And that 
would be a pity, for the world would benefit from 
having a thoughtful green movement. It would also 
be ironic, because far-reaching advances are 
already under way in the management of the 
world's natural resources-changes that add up to 
a different kind of green revolution. This could 
yet save the greens (as well as doing the planet 
a world of good).

"Mandate, regulate, litigate." That has been the 
green mantra. And it explains the world's 
top-down, command-and-control approach to 
environmental policymaking. Slowly, this is 
changing. Yesterday's failed hopes, today's heavy 
costs and tomorrow's demanding ambitions have 
been driving public policy quietly towards 
market-based approaches. One example lies in the 
assignment of property rights over "commons", 
such as fisheries, that are abused because they 
belong at once to everyone and no one. Where 
tradable fishing quotas have been issued, the 
result has been a drop in over-fishing. Emissions 
trading is also taking off. America led the way 
with its sulphur-dioxide trading scheme, and 
today the EU is pioneering carbon-dioxide trading 
with the (albeit still controversial) goal of 
slowing down climate change.

These, however, are obvious targets. What is 
really intriguing are efforts to value previously 
ignored "ecological services", both basic ones 
such as water filtration and flood prevention, 
and luxuries such as preserving wildlife. At the 
same time, advances in environmental science are 
making those valuation studies more accurate. 
Market mechanisms can then be employed to achieve 
these goals at the lowest cost. Today, countries 
from Panama to Papua New Guinea are investigating 
ways to price nature in this way (see article).
Rachel Carson meets Adam Smith

If this new green revolution is to succeed, 
however, three things must happen. The most 
important is that prices must be set correctly. 
The best way to do this is through liquid 
markets, as in the case of emissions trading. 
Here, politics merely sets the goal. How that 
goal is achieved is up to the traders.

A proper price, however, requires proper 
information. So the second goal must be to 
provide it. The tendency to regard the 
environment as a "free good" must be tempered 
with an understanding of what it does for 
humanity and how. Thanks to the recent Millennium 
Ecosystem Assessment and the World Bank's annual 
"Little Green Data Book" (released this week), 
that is happening. More work is needed, but 
thanks to technologies such as satellite 
observation, computing and the internet, green 
accounting is getting cheaper and easier.

Which leads naturally to the third goal, the 
embrace of cost-benefit analysis. At this, greens 
roll their eyes, complaining that it reduces 
nature to dollars and cents. In one sense, they 
are right. Some things in nature are 
irreplaceable-literally priceless. Even so, it is 
essential to consider trade-offs when analysing 
almost all green problems. The marginal cost of 
removing the last 5% of a given pollutant is 
often far higher than removing the first 5% or 
even 50%: for public policy to ignore such facts 
would be inexcusable.

If governments invest seriously in green data 
acquisition and co-ordination, they will no 
longer be flying blind. And by advocating 
data-based, analytically rigorous policies rather 
than pious appeals to "save the planet", the 
green movement could overcome the scepticism of 
the ordinary voter. It might even move from the 
fringes of politics to the middle ground where 
most voters reside.

Whether the big environmental groups join or not, 
the next green revolution is already under way. 
Rachel Carson, the crusading journalist who 
inspired greens in the 1950s and 60s, is joining 
hands with Adam Smith, the hero of 
free-marketeers. The world may yet leapfrog from 
the dark ages of clumsy, costly, 
command-and-control regulations to an enlightened 
age of informed, innovative, incentive-based 
greenery.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
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