In the age of the need to secure our future more firmly (i.e. in the age of the need to become more sustainable, it is useful to remind ourselves that business (and economic growth) share the same goal as ethics: they both seek to increase value in the world.
As long was we understand that only one form of value is monetary (and that there are manifold other forms of incommensurable, but nonetheless more important, value) and that it need not accrue primarily or only to the business operator, then we have a powerful conception of our social place in the world and on earth.
We also need to understand that the question of "to whom the value will accrue" is irrelevant except to the extent that the wealth creator needs enough to nourish a foundation for continuing to provide it (e.g. shelter, sleep food, happiness, family etc.) Creating more value benefits all who partake of it, and this should be an agreeable result for the those truly engaged in increasing value in the world (with due exceptions based on reasonable ethical grounds and distinctions - e.g. perhaps those who actively and deliberately detract from the value created.)
Aye - here is the rub: how do we define this and who places limits on it? While liberty recognizes that the self is the best knower of the self and therefore the best one to determine what is needed to nourish its foundations for social and ecological contibutions to value, it is also the self that is the best deceiver of the self. How can we protect the self from the self. Another way of putting this question might be to frame it in collective action parlance: "How can we ensure that the individually rational is 1. indeed individually rational (beneficial for that individual) and 2. does not overwhelm the socially and collectively rational by disproportionately attempting to acquire that value for itself at the expense of social value (e.g. standing on one's tiptoes in a concert hall to gain a better view at the expense of those behind us)?
Wednesday 22 October 2008
Wednesday 15 October 2008
A Vote for the Environment in Canada?
This morning (October 15, 2008) after the 2008 federal election in Canada, I received an E-mail from Sierra Club Executive Director Steven Hazel entitled "We voted for the environment." The evidence provided for this inference was that an "overwhelming 62 percent of voters cast their ballots for parties that pledged to reduce greenhouse gases in Canada and combat global warming."
As much as encouragement, a positive mental attitude, reassurance, confidence and self-esteem are crucial to successfully rising to any challenge (like accelerating resource consumption and entropy), there seems to be less basis for it than ever in last night's vote. It seems hardly "overwhelming" when 57% of eligible voters actually cast ballots (an underwhelming 43% did not). This is lowest voter turn out in Canadian history down from as high as 80% in the 1960's. Of the just over half the population who bothered to vote, only 62% of them voted for parties other than the one that did and said little about the environment (the Conservatives). The only party (besides the Greens) taking the (apparently huge!) political risk to suggest ecologically taxing activities be identified as such with a financial tax was rewarded with 20 fewer seats (down from 96) and only 26% of the popular vote (an all time low). This gives us very little on which to base anything that might have encouraging tones. In fact, the inference that seems warranted is the opposite: Canadians are some combination of stupid and stupefied.
Canadian voting behaviour last night (October 15th, 2008) (whether by the results of active voting or absence of voting) implies a yearning (or a yawning) for the unsustainable status quo even in the face of mounting evidence for the evasive action required for anything even slightly closer to sustainability. A glance at the global ecological context in which we live (not a hint of which was provided by our “leaders” in the election campaign) reveals in widening chasm between the behavioural change we urgently need and the tired ways we seem to continue to want.
By most estimations that "don't talk falsely now..." about the environment and economy (i.e. that do not come directly off the payroll of oil companies or placating politicians), "the hour is getting late" (Jimi Hendrix from "All Along the Watchtower").
We live in a world where,
• population growth adds 70 million new mouths to feed to earth each year.
• 20% of the people consume 80% of its material and energy resources and are hard-selling this lifestyle to those with the ability to pay with no regard for the fact that a similar lifestyles for an additional 5 billion humans would require 6 more earths to “feed.”
• we are fast approaching 400 ppm of CO2 (speaking of historic lows and highs – perhaps our stupefaction is caused by breathing increased amounts of anthropogenic CO2) and the resultant climate change is causing unpredictable and ineluctable changes to weather events, climate, ocean current and temperature patterns.
• 1 in 5 humans lack access to clean water and “live’ on less than $1/day
• 2 in 5 lack “adequate” sanitation.
• wealth disparity, hunger, malnutrition, pollution, over-consumption of both renewable and non renewable resources is increasing.
• Increasing amounts of GDP go into dealing with pollution, inefficiency and waste.
• economic growth is based largely on decreases in the ecological integrity that forms the conditions of our own possibility as a species.
• the one thing that can avert disaster is an attempt to align the two through charging fees that would promote efficiency and more judicious use of our surroundings.
• insurance companies and economists are all sounding strikingly like environmentalists on this last point. With increasingly consistency, they simultaneously reach a parallel conclusion: that it would be not only easier (species saving?) but “cheaper “to “invest” (cf. Stern's World Bank Report on the Economics of Climate Change) and act now rather than wait until more extreme weather, drought, famine and war besiege increasing amounts of the economy’s and the ecology’s finite if not scarce resources.
In last night’s election, Canadians had a chance to make a very significant step forward in beginning the process of making more realistic economic evaluations of economic and ecological resources. Both the Liberal’s and the Greens proposed a carbon tax and the NDP proposed the more modest step of carbon credit trading between companies whose activity requires significant carbon effluents. They all suggested we begin the process of placing an economic value on activities that make use of what are, after all, economically valuable "inputs" currently taken for free and granted. None of these parties made much progress. The party that made the most progress was none of these. It was the one whose main platform comes from the ironic cover of a Supertramp album: “Crisis? What Crisis?”
Moral suasion and education about more judicious use of scarce and finite resources for the benefit of future generations should continue much more robustly (of course), but we need REAL economically evaluative mechanisms right now (years ago actually) that will induce more efficiency and less waste into each of our daily materially consumptive activities. Without these, the autopilot of the status quo (that continues to externalize ecological costs and take the profits of natural capital for free and for granted) will continue to be in charge of our locomotion toward the missing trestles ahead. This can only mean that (contrary to the Sierra Club's honourable attempt to providing encouragement to forge onwards to fight the good fight to raise environmental consciousness) far from voting for the environment last night, Canadians voted for continuing their profligacy and accelerating their own (and the world's) demise.
Ignorance (even of impending doom) may be bliss, but the doom itself retains the final potentially informative gesture (in an unfortunately unteachable moment).
John R. Ferguson
As much as encouragement, a positive mental attitude, reassurance, confidence and self-esteem are crucial to successfully rising to any challenge (like accelerating resource consumption and entropy), there seems to be less basis for it than ever in last night's vote. It seems hardly "overwhelming" when 57% of eligible voters actually cast ballots (an underwhelming 43% did not). This is lowest voter turn out in Canadian history down from as high as 80% in the 1960's. Of the just over half the population who bothered to vote, only 62% of them voted for parties other than the one that did and said little about the environment (the Conservatives). The only party (besides the Greens) taking the (apparently huge!) political risk to suggest ecologically taxing activities be identified as such with a financial tax was rewarded with 20 fewer seats (down from 96) and only 26% of the popular vote (an all time low). This gives us very little on which to base anything that might have encouraging tones. In fact, the inference that seems warranted is the opposite: Canadians are some combination of stupid and stupefied.
Canadian voting behaviour last night (October 15th, 2008) (whether by the results of active voting or absence of voting) implies a yearning (or a yawning) for the unsustainable status quo even in the face of mounting evidence for the evasive action required for anything even slightly closer to sustainability. A glance at the global ecological context in which we live (not a hint of which was provided by our “leaders” in the election campaign) reveals in widening chasm between the behavioural change we urgently need and the tired ways we seem to continue to want.
By most estimations that "don't talk falsely now..." about the environment and economy (i.e. that do not come directly off the payroll of oil companies or placating politicians), "the hour is getting late" (Jimi Hendrix from "All Along the Watchtower").
We live in a world where,
• population growth adds 70 million new mouths to feed to earth each year.
• 20% of the people consume 80% of its material and energy resources and are hard-selling this lifestyle to those with the ability to pay with no regard for the fact that a similar lifestyles for an additional 5 billion humans would require 6 more earths to “feed.”
• we are fast approaching 400 ppm of CO2 (speaking of historic lows and highs – perhaps our stupefaction is caused by breathing increased amounts of anthropogenic CO2) and the resultant climate change is causing unpredictable and ineluctable changes to weather events, climate, ocean current and temperature patterns.
• 1 in 5 humans lack access to clean water and “live’ on less than $1/day
• 2 in 5 lack “adequate” sanitation.
• wealth disparity, hunger, malnutrition, pollution, over-consumption of both renewable and non renewable resources is increasing.
• Increasing amounts of GDP go into dealing with pollution, inefficiency and waste.
• economic growth is based largely on decreases in the ecological integrity that forms the conditions of our own possibility as a species.
• the one thing that can avert disaster is an attempt to align the two through charging fees that would promote efficiency and more judicious use of our surroundings.
• insurance companies and economists are all sounding strikingly like environmentalists on this last point. With increasingly consistency, they simultaneously reach a parallel conclusion: that it would be not only easier (species saving?) but “cheaper “to “invest” (cf. Stern's World Bank Report on the Economics of Climate Change) and act now rather than wait until more extreme weather, drought, famine and war besiege increasing amounts of the economy’s and the ecology’s finite if not scarce resources.
In last night’s election, Canadians had a chance to make a very significant step forward in beginning the process of making more realistic economic evaluations of economic and ecological resources. Both the Liberal’s and the Greens proposed a carbon tax and the NDP proposed the more modest step of carbon credit trading between companies whose activity requires significant carbon effluents. They all suggested we begin the process of placing an economic value on activities that make use of what are, after all, economically valuable "inputs" currently taken for free and granted. None of these parties made much progress. The party that made the most progress was none of these. It was the one whose main platform comes from the ironic cover of a Supertramp album: “Crisis? What Crisis?”
Moral suasion and education about more judicious use of scarce and finite resources for the benefit of future generations should continue much more robustly (of course), but we need REAL economically evaluative mechanisms right now (years ago actually) that will induce more efficiency and less waste into each of our daily materially consumptive activities. Without these, the autopilot of the status quo (that continues to externalize ecological costs and take the profits of natural capital for free and for granted) will continue to be in charge of our locomotion toward the missing trestles ahead. This can only mean that (contrary to the Sierra Club's honourable attempt to providing encouragement to forge onwards to fight the good fight to raise environmental consciousness) far from voting for the environment last night, Canadians voted for continuing their profligacy and accelerating their own (and the world's) demise.
Ignorance (even of impending doom) may be bliss, but the doom itself retains the final potentially informative gesture (in an unfortunately unteachable moment).
John R. Ferguson
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