Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS

[Victor Milne]

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Victor Milne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: October 25, 1998 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS

 

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My other point is, where is government in all of this?  Surely one of the outstanding functions of government is to ensure responsible business behaviour.  It is the business of business to grow and be profitable.  It is government's responsibility to ensure that business does not grow at the expense of the environment or consumers.  All too often, it fails to meet that responsibility, and in fact abandons it.  I worked for a very large oil company years ago.  It hired some very good environmental scientists and had a much broader understanding of environmental issues than the government agencies it had to deal with.  The government agencies had little data of their own and were in fact relying on the industry to provide information which would then form the basis for regulating the industry -- a little like trusting the fox to guard the henhouse.  Currently, at least in Canada, the capacity of government agencies to ensure responsible business behaviour is pretty close to zero -- witness the mess in the Health Protection Branch.

 

I agree one hundred per cent with the above: 

 

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And I would again point out that, when it comes to Limits to Growth, it is not profits that we should focus on, but costs and revenues.  By "costs" I mean all of the resource inputs that a firm must use to undertake production.  In the case of some types of business, such as the production of oil and gas, the environment itself is an input.  For a very long time, it was treated as a free input.  Now increasingly, there is a cost attached to it and that cost is rising.  It has already begun to act as a drag on economic activity -- e.g. try to get anything done in the northern Canadian environment without an army of lawyers!  That it has not risen high enough to stop us from using the environment indiscriminately is, I would suggest, the fault of regulatory authorities, not the oil companies.  I would argue that costs need to go much higher and need to be reflected at the gas pumps before some real responsibility works its way into the system.

 

In the case of revenues, I refer to the demand for end products.  As J.K. Galbraith and many others have pointed out, this is not independent of costs: the more the oil industry spends on advertising, the more likely we are to put tigers in our tanks and buy every energy using gizmo that the engineers can design.  However, my concern is what we do with all of the stuff.  As Jay Hanson has pointed out ever so many times, we are extremely wastefully garbage producers, true agents of entropy.  By being good and gullible consumers, we pollute the air, ruin the oceans, and generally make the planet less inhabitable.  Once again, I call on Pogo the Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us!"  We will either have to change our ways ourselves or we will be forced to do so by a radical change in our circumstances.

 

Ed  Weick

 

I have no real quarrel with the above. No doubt you are correct that costs are more closely correlated than profits with use of resource inputs. The costs are incurred of course in the pursuit of profits. Over the last quarter-century the corporate-dominated media have increasingly portrayed greed as commendable and ultimately working to the benefit of society as a whole. This is a matter of moral education rather than economics, but I believe it needs to be addressed. As long as our vision of society is completely tainted, I fear that attempts to improve the situation through purely technical means will likely result in one step forward followed by two steps backwards.

 

On the gas price issue this is a tricky problem that needs to be thought out carefully so that it doesn't hurt a lot of low-income people. People in rural areas especially do not have the same options of public transit and in many cases may not be able to organize a car pool to get to work. There's also the matter of the gaz-guzzling pickup trucks and vans. I think people should have to pay heavily if they're just puchasing them to feel macho, but many people use them to earn part-time income. Self-interest there. In addition to our day jobs my wife and I operate a small horse farm and need a full-size pickup to do it.

 

Ultimately the best answer to our growth problems would be population decrease. Isaac Asimov, who was certainly one of the most brilliant people in this century, thought a world population of one billion would be optimal both for the environment and for living standards.

 

Victor Milne

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