Geoffrey Heal

The great glaring difference between this and every other environmental or economics book I have read is the personality of Geoffrey Heal. He has been on every big name commission, every team, every conference you can imagine, from the UN down to tiny non-profits. He looks at everything as an insider; he has all the facts and the direct experience with them. He looks at our current mess as solvable problems, because he has seen the solutions in practice in various locales around the world. That is all very different from the doom and gloom I usually get. That alone makes this a worthwhile read.

Heal says there are four basic aspects to consider in a sustainable and responsible economy: external costs and the need to make polluters pay, common property and its overuse, natural capital as an input to our prosperity, and measuring what really matters.

Our biggest challenge is external effects (to economists. Unintended consequences to the rest of us). What we don’t know is killing us. Nothing happens in isolation. There are chains of consequences to everything we change. Heal says conserving the environment makes us richer, not poorer. Leaving the Earth at least the same is the best thing we can do for future generations, and we have the knowledge and understanding now to leave it in even better shape.

To me, the basic problems remains that no one speaks for Planet Earth. With 200 selfish governments acting (or not) on their own behalf, we can never bridge the global gap of pollution affecting other oceans, other continents, and the atmosphere. But Heal doesn’t address that. He does laud the one exception in history - the Montreal Protocol in 1987, where for the first and only time, everyone agreed to stop using CFCs as refrigerants. We have had innumerable conferences since, but no such agreements. The single biggest problem center, Heal says, is agricultural runoff, where absolutely nothing has happened. Fertilizer used in Minnesota is poisoning shrimp in Louisiana, is one example. We haven’t even begun to quantify the damage.

Another problem Heal does not address is the elephant in the room: the math doesn’t work. There are so many people making so many demands on resources we cannot continue to supply them as they increase. No matter how careful we are with fisheries, there aren’t enough fish in the world to supply seven billion people. Same goes for water in aquifers – no amount of regulation or market innovations will provide enough water for all. Heal’s local solutions of quotas and markets must remain local.

Not for the first time, the factor I really didn’t appreciate was Heal’s attempts to quantify the value of the Earth. For many unsatisfactory reasons, economists need to assign dollar values to everything. So what is the dollar value of clean air? What is the value of a mangrove forest? The value of seeing a lion on a safari is not the value of a lion on Earth. The air is free, but if there were no air, how much would it be worth? These are questions economists ask in their surveys of perceived value. The results are that Americans only consider natural capital to be 2% of their own total worth. As the World Bank’s Michael Toman put it, assigning value to nature is “a serious underestimate of infinity.” This path is the one Bjorn Lomborg took to determine there is no climate crisis, because our assets have increased in value. We’re still making a profit, so no worries. The more we dirty the air, the more valuable clean air becomes.

Heal’s answer to my concerns is that people won’t properly protect natural capital unless it has a dollar value. In that case, we’re doomed. It’s an arrogant, self-serving dismissal of what have here, and completely misses the point of us (not) fitting into an ecological matrix.

Once again, I will give the last word to Geoff Mulgan who wrote in The Locust and the Bee that communism collapsed because it didn't let prices tell the economic truth, and capitalism will collapse because it doesn't let prices tell the ecological truth.

David Wineberg… (altro)