By Polly Cleveland
DOLLARS AND SENSE: Imagine a world in which all people enjoyed a decent modern lifestyle without unduly degrading the natural resources on which future generations will depend. In such a world, people would live healthy, safe, well-educated lives, with ample opportunity to do productive and rewarding work, in a democratic, egalitarian society. Scandinavian nations already come much closer than the United States to providing such a lifestyle, with far lower per capita natural resource consumption…
n farming, in cities, and in businesses, there’s a common theme: we already have the technology to produce and live and work in ways that vastly reduce stress on natural resources and simultaneously create more jobs. The obstacles are political, in both developed and developing countries. In the United States, we’re up against a system that engenders waste of agricultural land, suburban sprawl, hollowed-out cities, and failing small businesses. First and foremost, the fossil-fuel industry enjoys tax and other subsidies, including the implicit subsidy of free carbon-dioxide dumping. These subsidies artificially lower the cost of transportation and other energy-intensive activities, such as the manufacture of steel, cement, and nitrogen fertilizer. Federal and state governments also subsidize uneconomical water development in dry regions, notably California. Cities themselves feed sprawl by extending roads and utilities below cost to well-connected developers in the boonies. Older cities withdraw services from poorer neighborhoods while granting tax favors to richer ones. Meanwhile, after President Reagan’s election in 1980, the U.S. federal government stopped enforcing anti-trust laws, setting off a merger frenzy among U.S. and multinational corporations. As Barry Lynn writes in Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010), “Even as we were reassured on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis that America was the greatest ‘free market’ economy in the world, a tiny elite engineered the most phenomenal roll-up of political economic power in our history.” During the financial crisis of 2008, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, previously CEO of Goldman Sachs, oversaw the subsidized shotgun marriages among the too-big-to-fail banks, making the survivors (including Goldman) even too bigger to fail—or to lend to small business.
Suppose that, by waving a magic wand, we could simply undo this rigged system. Yes, there would be disruptions and hardships. Many coal miners would need new jobs, perhaps restoring devastated landscapes. But with skyrocketing fossil-fuel prices, farmers would turn to those energy and land-saving, labor-using advanced technologies. Many of us would desert the suburbs for the cities, setting off a wave of urban renovation. In place of resource-wasting and labor-squeezing giant corporations, a fleet of smaller firms would compete for employees, driving up wages. With tax loopholes plugged, government agencies could provide excellent infrastructure, high- quality health and education services, and generous safety nets. That’s what sustainability squared means. We can have it all; we can save the environment using existing technology to create decent jobs and better lives for everyone… (more)
