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You can’t overstate the historic importance: for the first time ever, the US Senate came to the verge of taking up a far-reaching bill (The Boxer substitute to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act) that deals with global climate change. Republicans have been engaging in procedural tricks to try to kill the bill without actually voting on it (see “Shameful Obstructionism Stymies Climate Bill“, a Sierra Club press release, for an account), and just a few minutes ago a motion for cloture–to bring the bill to a vote–failed to achieve the 60 necessary votes.
For the past few weeks environmentalists and progressives have debated whether this was the best bill that could be gotten, whether it could have been improved through amendments, whether a better bill might be gotten out of a different, presumably more Democratic, Senate next year. In all that discussion there was one point that was overlooked:
Global climate change is ONE EXAMPLE of the ecological problem our industrial culture faces. It’s not the whole problem, not by a long shot.
What is the problem? Well, here’s how I frame it:
The problem is, we’re destroying the natural capital on which our civilization crucially depends.
Natural Capital is an idea that has been promulgated by ecological economists in the past few years. It begins with the recognition that nature provides human civilization with goods and services, and that the natural systems that provide these goods and services are not directly consumed in the process. This makes those natural systems the analogical equivalent of humanly built capital.
Basically, capital is tools: anything from the bricklayer’s trowel to the machinery and buildings that make up a factory where cars are assembled to the IT infrastructure that allows workers at a corporation to send each other email. These tools increase the productive capacity of the workers who use them. Unlike the bricks and mortar for the bricklayer, the fenders and engine parts in the automobile factory, or the employee’s time in the e-email example, the physical tools that the workers use are not consumed in the act of production. They facilitate the production, but aren’t used up by it. (The tools do wear out over time and need to be replaced.)
Natural capital is the extension of this notion to environmental goods and services. When you start seeing things through this lens, you see that the problem of global warming is that we have exceeded the capacity of the earth’s ecosystems to provide us with a necessary service–the absorption of one particular kind of waste that we produce.
A lot of people in the environmental movement don’t immediately take to using this conceptual lens; they’ve got a more romantic view of nature, a view of nature as pristine “otherness.” Walking on the conceptual paths trod by Thoreau and Muir, they see nature as the anodyne to industrial civilization, and because of that it seems wrong to compare a marsh, say, to a factory.
But the comparison is instructive. Both marsh and factory provide valuable productive services to humans. The factory does so rather obviously. The marsh’s productive services may not be so obvious, but they are just as real. Here’s a partial list of services a marsh provides:
1. Water purification
2. nutrient recycling
3. water regulation
4. regulation of microclimate
5. storm protection
6. habitat to species that provide valuable services
These services have economic value, though for most of human history we’ve never bothered to acknowledge that, or to count those values as any part of our decision making. Natural goods and services have a non-market economic value, which becomes clearer when you imagine having to pay for these services when natural systems no longer provide them. By one estimate, the world total of all ecosystem goods and services is something like $US 16 to 54 trillion per year, a number that is much larger than the combined global GDP. So much for the efficiency of markets, if they don’t even count the most valuable category of goods and services that humans receive. (Which is to say: there’s room to do some adjusting of market relations here, so that economic prices start to tell the ecological truth. They won’t do that without regulation–as the necessity for global warming legislation demonstrates.)
To give a large, easily understood example of a service provided by nature: a coastal bayou, or marsh, has plants in it that function like sponges. A linear mile of bayou will absorb four inches of storm surge. A hundred years ago, there were fifty miles of bayou between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. In the past century, those bayous were lost to development: they were dissected by canals, chewed up by dredging as companies looked for oil or built facilities to land oil being produced in the Gulf, and they were starved for replenishing sediment by an Army Corps of Engineers project that made the Mississippi River more “efficient” (for ship traffic) by straightening it. The loss of the meanders of the river sped the flow of water, which meant that sediment that previously had settled out, nourishing the bayous, was discharged deep into the Gulf, where it fouled shrimp fisheries (and created a dead zone).
Had those fifty miles of bayous been in place when Hurricane Katrina hit, they would have absorbed 200 inches of storm surge–about 17 feet. The surge that hit New Orleans was 22 feet. Had that surge been only five feet, there’s an excellent chance that the city’s storm defenses would have held.
So, in retrospect, what was the value of the storm-protection service those bayous provided? It has to be at least equal to the damage caused in this one episode–$88 billion, by one widely accepted estimate.
Let me emphasize this.
The bayous of southern Louisiana provided $88 billion in storm protection services before they were dismantled by development that proceeded under economic theories that didn’t take this valuable public service into account.
And of course, storm protection services were only ONE kind of economic service that the bayous provided. When all the other goods and services the bayous provided are summed, it becomes clear that while some people made money in the economic development that led to the demise of the bayous, in general the population of the region suffered large economic losses when the bayous were destroyed. In the absence of the bayous, some of the economically valuable services they provided had to be replaced by humanly built capital (all those levees and storm defenses for the City of New Orleans–though it seems they would have benefitted from spending even more) or weren’t replaced at all.
So what does this have to do with global warming?
Here’s the connection. The absorption of Green House Gasses is a service that the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystems provide to us. For centuries, the total emissions of GHG by all human activity fell well below the amount that the planet could absorb. As the Petroleum Era got into full swing, however, we started cranking out GHGs faster than the planet could absorb them. The productive capacity of the natural capital of the planet was exceeded; and finally we are coming to recognize that we have to rein in our GHG emissions or see dire (and economically expensive) consequences in the future.
Global Climate Change is just one example of humans using natural capital beyond its sustainable limit. If we are going to have a sustainable civilization (which, let’s be honest, is the end-in-view of global climate change legislation), we have to investigate, understand, and legislate in other areas in which we are exceeding the planet’s capacity to provide us with goods and services that are crucial to us.
What are some of those other areas?
A fishery is a form of natural capital: it can provide a stream of goods (fish) without being depleted. Any fishery has a Maximum Sustainable Yield, the maximum tonnage of fish that can be taken each year without reducing the amount that can be taken the next year. If that MSY is exceeded, then we are in effect drawing down natural capital and treating the resulting flow as income. Any company that sells off its capital assets and treats the resulting flow of money as income is going to go broke. This common-sense truth about business applies equally to natural capital: a civilization that cashes out its natural capital is going to disappear, as Jared Diamond’s book Collapse amply documents.
A forest is a form of natural capital. It provides a broad range of goods and services to humans, including: oxygen generation; carbon sequestration; water retention and regulation; nutrient recycling; soil fertiity augmentation; storm protection; lumber; fruits and nuts; habitat for economically valuable species; pest control; micro- and macro-climate moderation; etc., etc. If we harvest lumber from a forest at a faster rate than the forest can replenish itself, then we are, again, drawing down natural capital and treating the resulting inflow of money as income.
Much of the twentieth century assault on natural capital was enabled by cheap energy. It’s easier to overfish fisheries if you’ve got diesel-powered boats rather than wind-powered sailing vessels, easier to “harvest” whales to extinction if you’ve got factory ships and modern weaponry rather than a half a dozen guys in a rowboat with a harpoon. It’s easier to scrape away mountaintops–destroying ecosystems and putting an end to the flow of goods and services those ecosystems provide–if you’ve got huge earthmovers rather than horse-drawn scoops and blades. As energy becomes more expensive in the coming decades, the assault on natural capital will diminish. But I don’t think we can count on increasing energy costs alone to preserve enough natural capital to support human civilization at the level of welfare we’ve grown accustomed to.
Two hundred years ago, before the advent of the petroleum era, it seemed that the planet was infinite: it seemed to humans that the earth’s ecosystems could offer us their bounty infinitely, and that they could just as infinitely absorb our wastes. Of course, two hundred years ago, the human population was numbered in the hundreds of millions rather than today’s billions, and the ecological footprint of the average human life was a fraction of what it is today, because we had less energy at our command. With our larger population of humans living lives that have much larger ecological impact, that notion of an infinitely generous and absorptive earth is getting harder and harder to maintain. (At present, I think only a few Republican Senators and right wing radio talk show hosts still hold this idea in its full, naive, nineteenth-century form.)
The challenge that we face here in the opening decade of the twenty-first century is a challenge unprecedented in human history. The question: can we create, for the first time ever on this planet, an ecologically sustainable industrial society with a widely shared and generally high standard of living?
The world has never seen such a society, ever. Some societies, hunters and gatherers, mostly, managed to be ecologically sustainable, but they had low levels of material throughput and consequently a low material standard of living. Some societies, like the civilization of ancient Egypt, managed to last for thousands of years; but they were severely stratified, with the ruling class enjoying a much higher standard of living than the commoner or peasant class.
The challenge before us here at the start of the 21st century and at the beginning of the end of the Era of Oil is to create a new thing under the sun. Solving the problem of Global Climate change is one strong first step toward establishing our civilization as an ecologically sustainable civilization; but it’s only a first step.
And whenever and however we take this first step–next year, perhaps, with a different Senate, one with a higher percentage of members whose political perceptions are reality-based–let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are more steps beyond that one. To quote the wise slogan of last century’s civil rights movement, let’s keep our eyes on the prize.
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