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Page added on December 18, 2022
It’s the elephant in the room: can we grow the economy without destroying nature?
There’s a silence at the heart of our economic statistics.
Every quarter, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) publishes a number that shows how much economic activity has taken place in Australia recently.
We’ve all been conditioned to think it’s a good thing if that number goes up a little each time.
But what was the environmental cost of that increase in economic activity?
The ABS data doesn’t tell us.
And economists who write analyses of the quarterly movements in economic growth don’t talk about it either. And federal budgets don’t mention it.
Everyone ignores the elephant in the room.
Who’s accounting for the environment?
But our economic growth doesn’t occur in a vacuum.
It still depends on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the exploitation of other elements of nature.
To achieve the latest quarter of economic growth, how many more hectares of native forest were logged, how many more animal species became extinct, and how much more plastic did we pump into the environment?
We’re never told.
But imagine if that kind of environmental information was published alongside the quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) figure.
Every three months, the ABS would tell us economic growth increased by 0.6 per cent in the last quarter, say, and by 5.9 per cent through the year.
But it would also explain that New South Wales lost another 1,300 koalas last quarter, and Victoria logged another 750 hectares of its native forests, and our ocean fish stocks shrank by another 0.5 percentage points.
They could start with something like this, before getting far more granular:
If the information was presented that way, it would remind us that our economic system is constantly drawing down on the very resources that sustain life on earth: our forests, animals, soils, waterways and oceans.
And by making the relationship between economic growth and the environment transparent, it might change the national conversation.
The traditional way of thinking about ‘growth’
So why don’t we do it?
Partly for historical and technical reasons. And partly because vested interests haven’t wanted the system to change.
But consider the historical aspects.
It was back in the 1930s and 1940s when economists created the system of “national accounting” that allowed them to calculate a nation’s GDP.
In that same period, the British economist John Maynard Keynes invented macro-economics as a distinct discipline.
Both of those things helped to put “the economy” on a pedestal, a way of thinking about human economic activity that is an abstraction.
It’s when the phrase “economic growth” entered the public discourse to refer to growth in the national economy, rather than growth in wealth or trade.
See below.
It was after World War II when “economic growth” became the guiding indicator of a country’s economic health.
As the historian Stephen Macekura has written, political leaders, policymakers, and economists embraced the growth paradigm in that era to rebuild their economies and create as many jobs as possible for their restive populations after the war.
They also built new economic institutions to promote “national growth” around the world, and many of those institutions still exist today.
“The many international organisations and agreements established between 1944 and 1947 — from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to UN’s Economic and Social Council — stemmed from the assumption that national economic growth required international arrangements to minimise geopolitical conflict,” he says.
In 1947, the United Nations (UN) began to ask as many countries as possible to adopt a standardised system of national accounts so the “economic growth” framework could go international.
And that’s the economic accounting system that’s still in place today.
When the ABS tells us that Australia’s economy grew by 0.6 per cent last quarter, it’s using the framework developed by economists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
Problems with the GDP metric
However, that system of national accounting and the way we measure GDP have always had deficiencies.
One of the most glaring has to do with the environment.
The GDP metric only measures what counts as “economic activity” according to a very narrow definition.
It ignores things like species extinction, environmental destruction, soil depletion, and rising global temperatures.
Why? Because it follows the practice of economists from past eras to abstract “the economy” from the rest of nature, where damage to the environment is considered an “externality” — something external to the economic system.
When your priority is measuring economic activity that makes money, so you can figure out how to put money into more peoples’ pockets to lift living standards everywhere, your attention is focused on goods and services that are traded in the market place.
What does pollution have to do with that? That’s a problem for tomorrow.
But the traditional practice of abstracting “the economy” from the rest of nature has long had its critics, too.
It’s been famously challenged by reports such as the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (1972) and the Brundtland Report (1987).
In recent decades, after hearing the criticisms, the United Nations has even been trying to develop an accounting framework that links the environment and economic activity.
It’s called the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA), and it uses similar concepts and classifications as the original System of National Accounts (SNA) to try to make it possible — in the future — to integrate national environmental and economic statistics.
But that day hasn’t arrived yet, and it won’t be here for years.
All those yesterdays
And in the meantime, new “movements” within the broader environmental movement have been trying themselves to update the accounting and legal underpinnings of 21st-century capitalism.
In 2014, the Australian author and academic Jane Gleeson-White documented four of the new movements that she’d noticed in the 2010s.
She said each one was trying to tackle some of the key problems of our times, such as the inordinate power of modern corporations and the invisibility of the earth’s living systems in global economic and accounting measures.
The four movements were:
- Natural capital and ecosystem accounting for nations
- The burgeoning rights of nature movement, which resonates with indigenous earth-centred laws and cultures
- The push for a new corporation, the B Corporation, which is legally bound to benefit society and the environment while also making a profit
- Multi-capital or integrated reporting, which accounts for the wealth of society and nature as well as profit
Dr Gleeson-White said she could sympathise with their projects, but she could see problems with them too.
“The movements I recount are problematic, but they are materialising rapidly in the real world and offer important ways for thinking beyond the current economic, accounting and legal structures that shape our extractive global economy towards more regenerative thinking and institutions,” she wrote in 2020 (in an updated edition of her book).
“Today it is even more critical than when I was writing Six Capitals that we both attend to these movements and understand that when speaking about the natural world we must consider other, better ways of valuing nature than natural capital and ecosystem accounting,” she said.
We need new markets to save the market system
Which brings us to the final section.
Last month, I wrote about the news that former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has been working on something significant in Australia.
Dr Henry is among a group of people who have been trying to develop a way to measure the health of the environment to help them track if environmental conditions are degrading or improving over time.
And they made an announcement last month.
They said in a world-first, the Burnett Mary Regional Group (BMRG) in Queensland had just finished using their new method to take a “stocktake” of the environment within its borders, which included all of its animals, plants, waterways, and soil.
The stocktake covered 56,000 square kilometres of land.
They said the BMRG stocktake created a dataset that will give scientists a benchmark against which to track changes in the environment in the region over coming decades, allowing people to see how human economic activity is impacting the area.
Dr Henry is a director of a not-for-profit called Accounting for Nature (AfN) that developed the methodology and scientifically-based framework for environmental accounting that was used in the Queensland pilot.
Other AfN board members include Peter Harper, the former deputy Australian statistician at the Bureau of Statistics who was responsible for the ABS’s environmental statistics program, and chair Peter Cosier, the renowned conservationist and co-founder of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.
Dr Henry said he had become frustrated with the glacial pace of the UN’s efforts to incorporate environmental accounting into its system of national accounts.
When thinking about Dr Gleeson-White’s book, you can see that AfN (which was established four years ago) is part of the modern movement to develop natural capital and ecosystem accounting frameworks.
But it also begs the question: how do you put such frameworks to good use?
Dr Henry’s answer is not a universal one.
He says we could hopefully use them to develop new markets that attach a financial value to the improvement in environment conditions.
He says if those kinds of markets can get up and running, they may incentivise businesses to start pouring billions of dollars into environmental projects because it will be the profitable thing to do.
And that would help businesses to abandon their old model of profit-maximisation that excludes environmental destruction from its calculations, by turning environmental regeneration into a profit-making venture, he said.
“I think this is a game changer,” he told the ABC.
But if it feels like that’s an unnatural idea, at least you know where it’s coming from.
15 Comments on "It’s the elephant in the room: can we grow the economy without destroying nature?"
makati1 on Mon, 19th Dec 2022 2:37 am
Short answer: YES! How? Get rid of the waste and that includes most of the government bots and whores. What country needs 11,000,000+ paper pushers in the age of the computer?
Then there is the M.I.C. that sucks the blood of the taxpayers to produce mostly profits for the stock market casino. Most of the stuff they make is way over priced and faulty.
That is another thing to close down along with the Fed. People who do not produce real things are blood suckers on those who do. Those fired at Twitter are perfect examples of worthless bloodsuckers. Go MUSK!
The list of waste goes on and on…including the “renewable/green” bullshit.
Dredd on Mon, 19th Dec 2022 10:13 am
“can we grow the economy without destroying nature?”
In a way that is a false equivalency.
The degree to which we destroy nature is the degree to which we destroy ourselves.
Economy is now based on international trade and some 95% of it is sea-trade.
As go the ports, so goes economy, and thus us (Seaports With Sea Level Change – 28).
Know what I mean Verne?
makati1 on Mon, 19th Dec 2022 3:19 pm
Dredd, “sea level change” is not going to happen overnight. It will take centuries to threaten ports in most of the world. New ports will be built long before then. Trade goes on.
MadKat's Heavily Soiled Undies on Tue, 20th Dec 2022 4:41 am
MadKat, so now you’re a global climate change expert? I thought you believed climate change was a hoax. Good grief.
FamousDrScanlon on Tue, 20th Dec 2022 3:08 pm
mak, sea level rise has been costing America billions & billions for over a decade.
Does your ass bleed from all the bullshit you pull out of it for your comments? Holy fuck are you ever dumb. If you were 2-3 IQ points smarter, you would be just smart enough to be embarrassed from pretending to know things you clearly don’t know.
Rising Seas Are Flooding Norfolk Naval Base, and There’s No Plan to Fix It
The giant naval base in Virginia is under threat by rising seas and sinking land, but little is being done to hold back the tides.
“Even on a sunny day this spring, with the tide out, the field beside the firehouse was filled with water.
“It’s not supposed to be a pond,” said Joe Bouchard, a retired captain and former base commander. “It is now.”
Naval Station Norfolk, home to the Atlantic Fleet, floods not just in heavy rains or during hurricanes. It floods when the sun is shining, too, if the tide is high or the winds are right. It floods all the time.
“It is an impediment to the base accomplishing its mission,” Bouchard said.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25102017/military-norfolk-naval-base-flooding-climate-change-sea-level-global-warming-virginia/
Troubled waters in Newport
City’s drinking-water supply at risk from encroaching seas and stronger storms
City workers and crews called in from Naval Station Newport hauled sandbags up to the dam and piled them around the eroded portions in a last-ditch effort to prevent the pond from breaching.
“Were it not for the long hours and hard labor of these dedicated employees, the dam may have been washed away during the storm, with catastrophic results of the loss of our drinking water and flooding of the surrounding neighborhood,” the City Council declared in a resolution a few weeks later.
https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/risingthreat/troubled-waters-in-newport/
FamousDrScanlon on Tue, 20th Dec 2022 3:19 pm
The damage in Florida from rising sea levels already is here
Rising seas haven’t flooded us out yet, but they’re already wreaking havoc in a batch of ways — on flood insurance, property insurance, mortgages, property values, beach health and more. Sea-level rise isn’t an approaching problem; it’s a right-now problem.
Flood insurance
This year — Oct. 1 to be exact — the cost of federal flood insurance is going up dramatically because of sea-level rise and climate change.
For years, flood insurance from FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program has been priced artificially low and heavily subsidized by the Treasury Department.
Now, after innumerable worsening flood disasters, FEMA is instituting “Risk Rating 2.0,” which for the first time looks at individual properties’ flood risks and prices policies accordingly.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/guest-commentary/os-op-florida-sea-level-rise-damage-here-20210208-3mibpyp6ivhclacigj5pnycqgq-story.html
OK Mak this is where you jump in with your super-duper insight & tell us it’s an elaborate hoax.
Mak says Dey init fur duh money!
https://youtu.be/aHNgz_JQyZQ
FamousDrScanlon on Tue, 20th Dec 2022 3:36 pm
High-tide floods surge as climate changes and sea level rises
Over recent decades, coastal cities in the U.S. have experienced significant increases in floods that occur during high tide, which create dangerous driving conditions, road closures, groundwater contamination and other safety issues. Climate change and sea level rise have facilitated more of these high-tide floods
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-high-tide-surge-climate-sea.html
….
Sunny-Day Flooding Is About to Become More Than a Nuisance
Sea level rise will soon combine with a host of other environmental factors to produce dozens of floods each fall in US coastal cities.
During the summer of 2017, the tide rose to historic heights again and again in Honolulu, higher than at any time in the 112 years that records had been kept.
“Many areas along the East Coast are already experiencing recurrent impacts,” Thompson says. “In the mid-2030s, these other areas are going to catch up rapidly. So then it’s a transition from being a regional East Coast issue to a national issue, where a majority of the nation’s coastlines are being affected by high-tide flooding on a regular basis.”
https://www.wired.com/story/sunny-day-flooding-is-about-to-become-more-than-a-nuisance/
I can’t wait for the real estate rush to the exits. Folks will be freaking out worse than 9/11.
Millions will wake up some day in a home that has been devalued over night.
The copper pipes & wiring will be the only value left.
makati1 on Tue, 20th Dec 2022 5:13 pm
Madcat, I know that climates change, but not the bullshit put out on MSM “news”. It was global warming, and then, when that was proven false, it became climate change. It will not happen over night. The next sun cycle will change everything again. It has always been happening. Adjust.
BTW: When you hear something on the “news”, always ask: “Who benefits?” It’s ALWAYS about power and money. Always!
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 21st Dec 2022 1:29 pm
Mak I will expose your ignorance again.
It was the Bush Jr administration who went all out to change from global warming to climate change.
“To minimize the climate crisis, in an infamous memo back in 2002 Luntz advised President George W. Bush to emphasize uncertainty in climate science. He also told Bush to swap out the term “global warming” and replace it with “climate change,” which Luntz thought sounded less threatening.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-08-05/messaging-guru-offers-list-of-words-to-use-and-avoid-to-build-support-for-climate-solutions/
The phrase “global warming” should be abandoned in favour of “climate change”, Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as “conservationist” instead of “environmentalist”, because “most people” think environmentalists are “extremists” who indulge in “some pretty bizarre behaviour… that turns off many voters”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange
So you see it was the US rightwing denier propagandist who did the renaming.
That’s been known for 20 years, but not by you because you do not read – you make shit up like a scared little boy.
Fuck are you ever stupid. If there is a dumber denier out there than you I have not see him.
20 years ago and the propagandist, Frank Luntz, unlike you was man enough to stand up in from of the whole world and say ‘I was wrong’ that’s something you are incapable of doing no matter how many times I expose your ignorance.
Also, climate change and global warming are different terms that have been around for some time. Again you don’t know this because you don’t read and are too dumb & lazy to search.
Thus while the physical phenomena are causally related, they are not the same thing. Human greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, which in turn is causing climate change. However, because the terms are causally related, they are often used interchangeably in normal daily communications.
Both Terms Have Long Been Used
The argument “they changed the name” suggests that the term ‘global warming’ was previously the norm, and the widespread use of the term ‘climate change’ is now. However, this is simply untrue. For example, a seminal climate science work is Gilbert Plass’ 1956 study ‘The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change’ (which coincidentally estimated the climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide at 3.6°C, not far off from today’s widely accepted most likely value of 3°C). Barrett and Gast published a letter in Science in 1971 entitled simply ‘Climate Change’. The journal ‘Climatic Change’ was created in 1977 (and is still published today). The IPCC was formed in 1988, and of course the ‘CC’ is ‘climate change’, not ‘global warming’. There are many, many other examples of the use of the term ‘climate change’ many decades ago. There is nothing new whatsoever about the usage of the term.
In fact, according to Google Books, the usage of both terms in books published in the United States has increased at similar rates over the past 40 years:
https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=326
Stupid & lazy – the worst combination.
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 21st Dec 2022 1:46 pm
2002 memorandum to bush white house by GOP consultant Frank Luntz
https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/4/45/LuntzResearch.Memo.pdf
http://aireform.com/resources/archive-2002-memorandum-to-bush-white-house-by-gop-consultant-frank-luntz-17p/
Mak since 2002 you have been repeating a retard simple “they changed the name” narrative which a 30 second google search easily debunks.
Mak every single one of your climate change denial comments were written by guys like Frank Luntz.
It’s telling how much of a security blanket these denier narratives are since you cling to them and repeat them when the rest of the denier community has long abandoned them and moved on to the new memes from the latest Luntz – memo, speech propaganda writer.
Frank Luntz: the man who came up with ‘climate change’ — and regrets it
For three decades he made conservative ideas popular. He got a lot wrong, he tells Jane Mulkerrins
“You might call him a pollster or a political strategist. Frank Luntz simply calls himself a “word guy”. Over three decades in US politics 59-year-old Luntz has crafted messaging to make conservative ideas more palatable to the public. He coined the emotive term “death tax” to replace “inheritance tax”, used the words “energy exploration” to replace “offshore drilling” and advised the Bush administration to adopt his phrase “climate change” in place of “global warming”.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frank-luntz-the-man-who-came-up-with-climate-change-and-regrets-it-6v6pp00pc
See, you are the one that’s brainwashed and have been repeating party propaganda delivered via US MSM since at least 2002.
FamousDrScanlon on Thu, 22nd Dec 2022 6:47 pm
The $52 billion plan to save New York’s low-lying areas from sea level rise and storm surges
Published Thu, Dec 22 2022
*Roger Gendron’s community of Hamilton Beach, which sits on the Jamaica Bay, is plagued by up to a foot of tidal flooding almost every month.
*Gendron is one of tens of thousands of people who live on the far outskirts of Queens, where climate change has triggered rising sea levels and worsening coastal storms in low-lying neighborhoods.
*The region is now at the center of a historic federal plan that would funnel billions of dollars into constructing storm surge gates and seawalls to protect the Jamaica Bay area and all of New York.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/queens-battled-monthly-floods-as-sea-levels-rise-storms-worsen.html
Stupid white folk think they can engineer their way out or around Sea Level Rise – it won’t work no matter how much money/energy they throw at it. These cunts are among the biggest polluters ever with massive waste streams in their wake. Reaping what they’ve sown.
Get ready for more. There will be legions of home & business owners with their hands out crying for a big Gov bailout.
The community should hire Mak to walk their streets during the ever increasing sunny day flooding days (wearing hip waders) yelling “it’s a hoax” bla bla bla “MSM” bla bla “for duh money” bla bla “THEY” bla bla “THEY” “THEY” “THEY”…..
FamousDrScanlon on Thu, 22nd Dec 2022 6:52 pm
Forest fires in Argentine Tierra del Fuego the worst ever
“Authorities in the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego Friday confirmed that over 10,000 hectares of land have already been consumed by forest fires, making the current episode the largest such catastrophe in the history of the province.”
https://en.mercopress.com/2022/12/17/forest-fires-in-argentine-tierra-del-fuego-the-worst-ever
FamousDrScanlon on Thu, 22nd Dec 2022 7:03 pm
A ship that sank mysteriously 86 years ago has resurfaced as Utah’s Great Salt Lake continues to dry up
“As severe drought continues to take hold in the western United States, water levels at the Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, have dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ship-sank-mysteriously-86-years-170407718.html
……
How states across the West are using cloud seeding to make it rain
“It’s become widespread of late as the West battles a drought of historic proportions. States, utility companies and even ski resorts are footing the bill.
While it was was assumed for decades to be effective, recent studies have helped prove that cloud seeding works, and there’s no evidence that silver iodide is harmful at current levels. Experts say cloud seeding generally yields a 5% to 15% increase in precipitation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/17/how-cloud-seeding-can-help-replenish-reservoirs-in-the-west.html
Definition of insanity = Trying to fix a problem with the same thinking that created it.
Albert Jewstine came up with that one. I luv dem Jews.
makati1 on Fri, 23rd Dec 2022 1:00 am
Famous, you only expose your brainwashed indoctrination. Give it up.
Jeembo on Mon, 24th Jul 2023 2:24 am
You definitely can’t maximize economy growth while also trying to even sustain(let alone recover) environment. It’s good to see over the last years that a lot of companies/organization donating to conservation purposes(I know Sitka does it, I think Taurus guns like https://gritrsports.com/taurus/ and a few other firearms manufacturers do too), but still not enough to even conserve…