Globally Green Living

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Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, talks about creating green jobs and improving the environment in this inspiring presentation at TED in 2006.

She’s an activist for environmental justice and breaks it down for those who don’t know what that means. “No community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.”

 

When you think of environmentalists, you often think of tree-huggers or of people with money and education and who can afford to think of the rights that the environment should have according to their views. Thus the environmental movement is, in essence, an elitist movement. After all, all the energy-efficient appliances and vehicles are usually priced above the non-efficient ones. And although in the long run, it may make more monetary sense to have energy efficient stuff, most low-income people make decisions based on what is best for them in the short run (no wonder then all this big fuss about the impending collapse of the mortgage industry, balloon mortgages, the real estate bubble, etc. but I digress…).

I was rather surprised then when I read in the New York Times Tom Friedman’s column about an African-American man, who wants to convert African-Americans to the green movement. The man, Van Jones, says:

“You can’t take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to China and then have them do it and send it back,” said Mr. Jones. “So we are going to have to put people to work in this country — weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms. Those green-collar jobs can provide a pathway out of poverty for someone who has not gone to college.”

Jones views the environment as an opportunity for blue-collar workers to not just obtain employment but also to find a niche where they can specialize in and eventually move up the employment ladder. The premise of the success of this argument is that people will indeed see the opportunity and act on it. It all seems to make perfect sense.

But more often than not, the environment is viewed as a way of losing jobs (so much for Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” that Alan Greenspan so much loves). And I can’t wait for some people to start saying that houses that are retrofitted to be energy-efficient are more expensive and minorities cannot afford them and that is just another way of benefiting white people because they will be the ones saving on energy costs and so on and so forth…

And thus, I imagine that to prevent the white people from saving money on their electrical bills, we will prevent the minorities to climb the environmental and economic ladders, even if ever so slowly. Funny how humans are…

It turns out that ethanol is not as environmentally benign as some people thought. Since the U.S. decided to invest heavily on ethanol production from corn, the food supply that relies on corn syrup and the underground water sources have been strained. This is so ridiculous that I laugh at the thought.

Why are we investing so heavily on corn ethanol? So that we can have cheap fuel.

Why do we want cheap fuel? So that we can drive to Wal-Mart twice a week instead of once in our fuel inefficient vehicles.

Good grief…

Would it not make more sense just to conserve gasoline while investing in truly sustainable energy sources? You know the ones that don’t suck freshwater or natural gas, as corn does.

I don’t get it! Why isn’t responsible driving a conservation practice?

The top polluting countries in the world have gotten together to see what they can do to address climate change. The meeting was called by the U.S., in particular by President Bush who, a few years ago, was saying that there is no global warming or effect on climate, for that matter.

Now, after Katrina, you’d better not even utter the idea that global warming is a hoax. Although, it seems that some people also take it to the other extreme, where everything you do causes global warming, but let’s move on.

To fight climate change, the U.S. has “aspirational” goals. What does that mean exactly? Because I aspire to win the lottery but since I don’t play, I don’t see it ever happening. Is that it? Are good intentions sufficient to say you’re trying to make a change?

Let’s get real people. We live in a wealthy country! If the effects of climate change are such that natural disaster will be more likely to occur then the same natural disaster in a rich country vs. a poor country will cause a greater harm in the rich country. The rich country has more infrastructure, is more integrated, contains on average more educated people, and people on average have more assets. Thus, the more you have the more you can lose. That’s what Hurricane Katrina taught us. How long is it going to take for us to learn its lesson and fix our problems?

Or, as Alan Greenspan says, are we just too dumb to learn it the first time around? Do more people have to die and does more destruction have to happen before we do something about it? How long until we adapt and how much is our adaptation going to cost in unproductive activities?

A few years back I just got really amazed at how much stuff comes from China. How can it be that so many things can be made in China then shipped across the world and be sold at unbeatable prices?

The answer is simple. To cut costs you must sacrifice things like labor costs and pollution control. But it gets better. The negative impact on the environment of the Chinese modus operandi is so high that if one were to adjust China’s GDP growth rate, it would drop 5.8% to 3%. This drop represented a cost of $67 billion in 2004! At a 3% growth rate, China hardly would be an economic miracle.

But rates are rather elusive units of measurement. Let’s look at some hard numbers. For example, “Chinese environmental experts, estimated that annual premature deaths attributable to outdoor air pollution were likely to reach 380,000 in 2010 and 550,000 in 2020.” Water related pollution caused an estimated 750,000 deaths annually in China. That’s over one million people every year just from water and air!!!

The situation is so bleak that the athletes in the 2008 Olympic games will probably perform below par because the air in Beijing is so polluted.

What to do, what to do?… Pollute less, I guess. But the Chinese government is worried that that might dampen the fabulous Chinese economic growth. So, as I see it, the issue boils down to: do you want to be poor in a clean environment or would you rather have a little bit of money in an environment that could kill you?

Anyone who really knows me well knows that I am a Farmer’s Market nut, a true junkie. I just love going to a place where all the different veggies are laid out and you get to meet people who watched the food that you are buying grow. It’s not that I only eat organic food, far from it. It’s that I equate Farmer’s Market food with well cared for food, and that makes me happy. Even if the farmer uses a little bit of chemical fertilizer here and there, I don’t mind. If a plant is thriving and well cared for, it will resist pests better and one does not need to use pesticides or herbicides.

But all this care has to be paid for and sometimes there is a steep difference in prices at the supermarket and at the Farmer’s Market. I don’t mind paying a higher price for Farmer’s Market food, but sometimes I worry that the price has gotten too high, not because it costs more to the farmer but because the people that demand it are food snobs with extra-money to spend. I know all about market prices and the intersection of supply and demand. But sometimes I wonder if it is the demand that raises the price or if the higher price produces the demand. I mean, if you price your squash as $3.50 are you basically telling people with money that your squash is awesome and it’s so special that it’s worth every penny?

No, there is no river underground. In the old days people thought that underground water came from a nondepletable underground river. These days we know that that is not true. We also know that our planet holds fabulous water supplies but most of these are not readily available for us to consume. Freshwater, it turns out, is a depletable resource. When thinking about using freshwater, we must think of the different alternatives where it can be used. Does it make more sense to use it to irrigate crops, irrigate lawns, household consumption, etc. Of course, there is no right answer because it all depends on how we value each different alternative use. But how many of us think about those when we consume the water that comes out of the tap? Almost everything we consume in some way or other uses water as an input, so the demand for water is not just a direct demand for water but also a derived demand, that is a demand that is created because we demand products that use water.

Our water is in trouble, can we get it out of it?

Today I had dinner with a biosystems engineer that works on environmental issues. He talked about how economics is really needed to evaluate all the monetary aspects of environmental problems. I could not help but think of the words of Vernon Smith a few days ago at the AAEA meetings in Portland, OR. Dr. Smith said that one must not worry too much about all the fuss about renewable energy, global warming, and environmental issues because in the end free markets work and the free market will take care of the problem. That is true, the market does work. But it works better for people with money than for people without money. It’s a bit like the Enron scandal. The company had gotten to be bad and eventually, the truth came out and the ruthless market swallowed it. But for those people associated with Enron who had money or with enough time in front of them, the market was not as ruthless as for those nearing retirement, whose life was strongly invested in Enron. The weak always pay a higher price. I suspect the same will happen with the environment, only at a much bigger scale…