NEW RESPONSIBILITY OF GOVERNMENTS
Chapter 12. Accelerating the Transition
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
Building an eco-economy depends on a shared
global vision and a broad understanding of the fiscal restructuring
needed to realize the vision. It is up to governments to foster
the national vision of an eco-economy and to adopt the ecologically
defined economic policies needed to build it. This will require
a systematic effort to incorporate input from ecologists in economic
policy formulation, especially in restructuring taxes and subsidies
to help the market reflect the ecological truth.
Building public support for change of this scale will not be easy
because it involves challenging vested economic interests. A sustainable
economy will not emerge by accident, but only as a result of concerted,
intelligent effort by an informed citizenry supporting strong political
leaders. There is no substitute for political leadership in building
an eco-economy.
It is up to national governments to develop long-term plans of where
we want to go and how we plan to get there. The basic components
of this plan are rather straightforward. They include reestablishing
a balance between carbon emissions and carbon fixation, between
aquifer withdrawals and aquifer recharge, between trees cut and
trees planted, between soil loss and soil regeneration, and between
human births and deaths.
The issue is not whether these balances will eventually be established.
The only question is how. If societies do not achieve a balance
between births and deaths by reducing births, nature eventually
will do so by raising deaths. With aquifers, the choice is whether
to balance pumping and recharge soonwhile
there is time to adjustor
to delay until the aquifer is depleted and the resulting fall in
food production leads to potentially catastrophic food shortages.
Formidable though the effort to build a sustainable economy appears
to be, almost all the component goals have been achieved by at least
one country. China, for example, has reduced its fertility rate
to below two children per woman and is thus headed for population
stability within a few decades. Denmark has banned the construction
of coal-fired power plants. Israel has pioneered new technologies
to raise water productivity. South Korea has covered its hills and
mountains with trees. Costa Rica has a national energy plan to shift
entirely to renewable sources to meet its future energy needs. Germany
is leading the way in a major tax-shifting exercise to reduce income
taxes and to offset this with an increase in energy taxes. Iceland
is planning the world's first hydrogen-based economy. The United
States has cut soil erosion by nearly 40 percent since 1982. The
Dutch are showing the world how to build urban transport systems
that give the bicycle a central role in increasing urban mobility
and improving the quality of urban life. And Finland has banned
the use of nonrefillable beverage containers. The challenge now
is for each country to put all the pieces of an eco-economy together.8
Conveying the information needed to help people understand the imperative
for change means collecting and disseminating information on key
environmental indicators on a regular basis. For example, governments
publish economic data on such trends as new housing starts, employment
levels, labor productivity, and international trade balances each
month. There is now a need for governments to systematically gather
and publish the environmental data on such trends as carbon emissions,
tree planting, water productivity, recycling rates, ice melting,
and wind turbine installations, so we can measure progress on the
environmental front.
An ideal way to transmit this information is through regular governmental
press briefings that would relate these trends to the evolution
of an eco-economy. Doing so could raise public understanding to
where people will not only accept change, but actively work for
it. This could include, for example, a press conference on melting
glaciers and ice caps and the consequences for the country of resulting
rises in sea level. In countries where population continues to grow,
regularly assessing the future effect on the water supply and cropland
availability per person could help build public support for stabilizing
population.
Making the shift from a carbon-based to a hydrogen-based energy
economy will require a major government effort to lead and inform.
While many environmentalists and professionals in the energy industry
understand the need for this, few understand the technologies that
will be involved or the incentives needed to ensure that this fundamental
shift proceeds on schedule. There is also a need for national annual
reports on progress toward an eco-economy. The role of government,
always important, is now even more so.
ENDNOTES:
8.
China fertility rate in PRB, op. cit. note 2; International Energy
Agency, Energy Policies of IEA Countries: Denmark 1998 Review (London:
October 1998); Israel in Sandra Postel, Last Oasis, rev. ed. (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 58, 118-19, 128-30, 148,
189; South Korea from author's observations, November 2000; Costa
Rica in U.S. Department of State, "Background Note: Costa Rica,"
April 2001, www.state.gov/www/background_notes/costa_rica_0600_bgn.html;
Germany from David Malin Roodman, "Environmental Tax Shifts Multiplying,"
in Brown et al., op. cit. note 3, pp. 138-39; Iceland from Seth
Dunn, "The Hydrogen Experiment," World Watch, November/December
2000, pp. 14-25; U.S. soil erosion in Agriculture Economic Report
Number 794 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),
January 2001), p. 3; Netherlands in "White Bikes Return to Amsterdam,"
Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, 1 November 1999; Finland in
Brenda Platt and Neil Seldman, Wasting and Recycling in the United
States 2000 (Athens, GA: GrassRoots Recycling Network, 2000).
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
|
|