The New Ideas Blog

Why is Boeing making planes from carbon fiber now? Because it is lighter than aluminum and so the planes use less fuel. Between this and other technological advances, the new Boeing 787 will be 20% more efficient than conventional planes. Airlines will like that.

Now, it is no surprise that companies will make environmentally-friendly changes when it means more profit. We don’t have to believe that they are interested in making such changes for the sake of the environment itself, although they will likely hint at that in their marketing. Nor do we need them to have any concern for a clean environment.

If we want a livable planet, we need only be sure that people pay the real costs of the things they do. In other words, motives of profit and/or loss are enough if our laws, regulations and public policies allow them to work. Let’s look at a couple examples.

Oil

If we want to reduce air pollution by reducing the amount of oil we burn, there are a couple perfectly fair policy changes that we can implement. They increase the cost of using that oil so it’s closer to the true price. Start with the gas tax. It covers about 30% of the costs of maintaining our roads and highways. Triple it so we pay the real cost. As we learned in the summer of 2008, when the price goes high enough people do drive less.

Second, we can stop subsidizing the oil industry through cheap leases on public lands and lax requirements for cleaning up after themselves. After all, if you granted a company permission to drill in your backyard, you would charge full market rates and require that they leave the land clean when done, right? If they don’t pay full price and they leave the land less valuable, the taxpayer eats the loss, once again hiding the true cost of that oil. And again, if the true cost is in the price, we will use less.

Finally, can we agree that a puff of smoke in the air doesn’t kill? In other words, there is some level of “use” of the air that is safe. Let real science (not politics) determine what that level is, and then design reasonable regulations to limit pollution to that level. If that makes cars more expensive it is only because we are paying closer to the true cost for using the car - as we should - instead of hiding and passing on some costs in the form of health problems from excessive air pollution.

Water

There are towns in the western United States that will run out of water in my lifetime. If they are small they will disappear. If they are large enough, they will find expensive ways to get more water, but the consumer will not pay the full cost. That is the problem, and points to the solution.

First, I think we can all agree that even if we set aside the environmental damage, it makes no sense to use water from an aquifer faster than it can replenish itself naturally. It’s like spending your money faster than you’re making it or eating up the seeds for next year’s crops. It’s just plain stupid, isn’t it?

So how do we limit the use of water to a sustainable level and so avoid the future destruction of whole communities and their environments? The political way is to create scapegoats of those who want to wash their cars or have green lawns, and pass laws about who can use water for what and when. This has happened already in many areas. Meanwhile the water is still being used up.

A better way is to make people pay the true cost of water. Obviously water usage would go down if the price were three or ten times as high. Raise the price until the usage goes down to a level of sustainability. That price represents the truth about the situation, after all.

Then if it costs $4,000 annually to water a big green lawn in Phoenix, let people do it. If people have to spend $4 for water just to wash their SUVs in their own driveways - they are free to do so. Not only are they allowed, but there is nothing wrong with those lawns or car washes because the owners are paying the true cost for the sustainable use of that water.

If need be the first six hundred gallons monthly per meter could be discounted so basic usage for drinking and cleaning are not too expensive for the poor. Of course that would mean the larger users are slightly subsidizing the smaller ones, but it would probably be a political necessity. At least the towns would not have to die for a lack of water.

Everything

Stop putting roads into national forests for free for lumber companies, and so subsidizing the cost of lumber. Perhaps if we paid the true cost instead of hiding some of it in general taxes, we would build smaller homes - very good for the environment.

Stop giving big welfare checks in the form of agricultural subsidies to wealthy cotton farmers and they might stop using up the water to grow thousands of acres of cotton in the desert around Safford Arizona. Again we hide the true cost of cotton, paying part of it through taxes.

We allow farmers up and down the Mississippi to dump toxic chemicals on their fields - which then run off into the Gulf, creating a dead zone a hundred miles across where fishermen used to make a living. In other words they pass along part of the cost of growing their crops to the fishermen who lose their income. If reasonable regulations that keep chemical contamination of the water to safe levels mean a 20% increase in vegetable prices, that’s only fair - it’s the true cost.

There may be an anti-human element in some extreme environmental philosophies. But virtually all of us can agree that it makes no sense to poop where we eat, and that we don’t have the right to dump our garbage on others. And at a minimum we want an environment that supports healthy human life. A good start is to acknowledge the true costs of having that - and start paying them directly. That gets our own self-interested motivations in line with what works.

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Tags: environmentally friendly, profit, real costs

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Political Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.