Tomorrow, American voters turn a historic and hopeful gaze on the next Presidential administration. Here’s what I think President Obama should do to respond to our sustainability challenges.
But first, what to avoid. President Obama already has a climate czar; it would be tempting to recommend a national Secretary of Sustainability with the President’s ear, but I don’t think this is in the best interests of our nascent green movement. Imagine if a central government figure had tried to craft the wild evolution of the Internet — would such an authority have conceived of an elegantly brilliant concept like Twitter? No, the market still needs to let its “rational exuberance” over sustainability evolve.
The same temptation holds for reigning in the likes of Big Oil. In light of AIG’s arrogance and the automakers’ jet-set solicitations, it’s easy to suggest that industry is underregulated, greedy, broken. However, when it comes to sustainability, strict regulation is not the answer. Witness the biofuels debacle: we pushed for pro-ethanol legislation only to find that we were locked into a fuel source far less beneficial than we’d imagined. Local legislation like San Francisco’s ban on plastic grocery bags is similarly heavy-handed.
Here’s the crucial distinction: President Obama should determine the rules of the marketplace, not the marketplace itself. In order to function smoothly toward a sustainable future, industry must be made to shoulder its own externalities by legislating for an ecological allowance standard.
Many methods of internalizing ecological costs to align public and corporate interests have already been put forth, with most centering on carbon taxation or cap-and-trade; economist Gilbert Metcalf makes a decent case for a carbon tax in this month’s MIT Technology Review. However, I’ve never been overly hot and bothered about carbon (ah, global warming puns). Although it’s a better proxy for a company’s overall environmental footprint than, say, the number of green Skittles consumed, it’s still an incomplete measure. Should a company increase its use of formaldehyde-based adhesives to lower its greenhouse emissions? How many gallons of clean drinking water balance a pound of CO2? These complex questions require lifecycle thinking that can’t be answered by the most thorough carbon footprint.
So, the Obama Administration should adopt an ecological metrics standard based on life cycle assessment (LCA). Several independent lifecycle measurement systems currently exist, from the light Okala design tool to full-blown LCA software. I don’t really care what the standard is, as long as it’s well-vetted, consistent, and adaptable. Companies can then be charged taxes or tradable allowances based on the full lifecycle impacts of their entire product systems — supply chain and all.
Once a standardized system for measuring product sustainability is adopted, the road will be paved for a freer market — a more open and honest one that accounts for the true costs of doing business. Imagine the price of coal power if the cost of its electricity includes the rise in marginal health care costs from increased cases of asthma and cancer; would coal-powered energy still be in anyone’s best financial interests?
If we factored in the costs and values of the natural capital that goes into the products we make, we couldn’t afford to keep poisoning ourselves and our world. That would be a fitting legacy for the most powerful change agent of our generation.
