It’s always difficult to write (non-boring) posts on conferences. People come on stage, discuss wonky issues, and leave. There’s rarely any "news." If people really wanted to hear my running commentary, they would do what With-It People do and follow my tweets.
So, just a broad observation on today’s events. One of the earliest sessions of the day was Bjorn Lomborg, delivering his increasingly ridiculous message that we have to prioritize social spending (banal) and that spending to avert climate change just doesn’t pass the cost-benefit analysis test (absurd).
Underlying Lomborg’s nonsense is an assumption so common (in some circles) that it scarcely seems worth stating explicitly, much less defending: that reducing emissions is all about immediate economic costs and nebulous, distant social benefits. The question is always, do the nebulous distant benefits justify the immediate economic costs?
This mindset informed virtually all the questions the moderators asked (with the exception of Jeffrey Ball, who’s very sharp). With every business or policy proposal, it was, what about the cost? Will people pay the cost? Can we afford the cost during a recession? The one-track-mindedness reached comic proportions a few times. Right after Lomborg, architect William McDonough came out, told a few stories of saving companies millions of dollars, then built his way in a poetic reverie on buildings that could be like trees, fecund and regenerative. WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel paused, and then, I kid you not: "But what about the cost?"
Jaybus. I mean, A, how about having more than one thought, and B, he just told you he saved these companies millions of dollars. S-A-V-E-D. That like ... un-cost.
When WSJ’s Alan Murray was interviewing Amory Lovins, he just kept repeating incredulously, "but what about the trade-offs?" "Trade-off" is code for the notion that any environmental improvement comes at economic expense. Lovins, meanwhile, was talking about building super-efficient buildings at under average cost. He was repeating, as he has so many times, that saving energy (and cutting emissions) is cheaper than buying it.
I don’t know why people who were cheerleaders for an utterly pointless $3 trillion war and hundreds of billions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts suddenly become obsessive-compulsive bean counters when it comes to, oh, improving public health or saving our grandchildren from untold misery, but if you’re going to count the beans, count the fracking beans.
This is the second year I’ve been at this conference. CEO after CEO talks about making big investments and getting even bigger returns. I have not seen or met a single businessperson who has done this stuff and says anything but, "I’m glad we did it, it paid off bigger than we thought it would, it energized my employees, it absolutely makes business sense." The only people I’ve seen say anything negative about greening efforts are people like Michael Morris who have resisted making them.
Why, in the face of this torrent of evidence, do some folks fail to see the profitable emission reduction strategies in front of them? Lovins later asked Gore, somewhat plaintively, "how can we change the conversation from sacrifices and costs to opportunities, jobs, and savings?"
I wish I knew. It’s a peculiar sort of malady, like color blindness or something.
Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!
Comments
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hapa Posted 6:03 pm
05 Mar 2009
BTW did you know it also costs money to comply with banking laws?
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Max8806 Posted 8:30 pm
05 Mar 2009
I'm certainly as frustrated as the next (green) guy at the undue pessimism about epic costs, but I don't think we do ourselves any good by exaggerating ourselves. If we really do believe this is a net positive for the country, as I do, we should be willing to acknowledge significant distributional costs so we can start the discussion on how to adequately compensate them and move forward with a bill that's good for (almost) everyone. If, such as through cap & dividend, we continue to ask a particular part of our country to bear almost all of the cost, we will never get a bill passed with the targets we need. Plus its unfair. We get stuck with free allocation and offsets because we refuse to put forward better, more fair and more efficient means of providing transition assistance.
Start with cap/dividend, but reserve 15% of auction revenue for a fund to be distributed to states by their historical (say, as of yesterday) carbon-intensity of their energy supply. Another 15% would go into a fund to be distributed to states based on their historical levels of employment in energy intensive industries, like paper, bulk chemicals, glass, cement, steel and aluminum (maybe I'm missing a couple but the set is fairly well-defined).
These allocation decisions would be made to states not companies, with very simple formulas based on very simply and intuitive criteria related to need. It would not detract from the simplicity appeal of cap/dividend, and would in fact keep it simpler by deflecting calls for offsets and free allocation to affected companies. Since allocation would be on historical levels of employment and carbon-intensity there would be no perverse incentive to preserve those conditions going forward to keep getting revenue.
Max Epstein
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Pangolin Posted 12:59 am
06 Mar 2009
Why bother with ten year investments in thermal efficiency when Wall Street's magic boxes could turn that same initial payment into free money. Except that Bernie Madoff and his hedge fund cronies were all running Ponzi schemes.
All you need to know about business majors you can learn from looking at the stock market dive and then comparing it to the happy talk on the WSJ's front page. They don't have a freaking clue what's happening.
The gods of Wall Street still simply refuse to understand that energy flows are the economy. All the games they play with money don't change the amount of energy available to do work until you actually build new energy harvesting systems.
Jimmy Carter was right all along. He was a submarine commander; he understood sealed system economics intimately.
Put the Carbon Back
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2wheeler Posted 2:24 am
06 Mar 2009
The other folks in attendance, probably kept trying to point out that there is more to decision making than payback time. Many folks buy depreciating assets and "use them up" with no expectations of payback. Clothes, food, transportation, housing (rent or mortgage interest), etc.
I believe we simply need a new yardstick. The dismal science can only inform us so much in regards to public decision making. A sustainability index, a quality of life index, both would be arguably better than a GDP to measure and communicate "progress" toward meaningful national goals that we'd want to strive for and proudly point to as we pass the torch to our children and theirs down the line.
Re-conceptualizing progress: that's the real challenge before us all at this time. Not re-defining it for pragmatic reasons due to the economic downturn, but actually bringing in all those other values of quality of life, which the economists just can't begin to measure. That work is still in its infancy, I'm afraid. But at least Grist is shining a light into the territory we should be mapping.
Moving toward sustainability with hopefulness, one revolution at a time.
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JMG Posted 6:58 am
06 Mar 2009
However, you put your finger on something quite profound. It was serving as an officer aboard a nuclear sub that probably -- more than any other experience -- helped me really get, at the visceral level -- the need for ecosystems thinking.
Because, in a real way, the world is just a big submarine. There is no "away," and we are the crew responsible for keeping the life support systems working, or at least not trashing them.
I'd hoped that Obama, being Hawai'ian would have an islander's sense in his bones that there are limits to growth and that you shouldn't despoil your only home. Alas, he seems to have absorbed a lot more of the "there's plenty more where this came from" mindset a lot more.
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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