Gernot Wagner's Blog, page 17

What good is wilderness?

The Economist debates the use of wilderness:

This house believes that untouched wildernesses have a value beyond the resources and other utility that can be extracted from them.

In one corner: an environmentalist. In the other: someone purporting to hold up the flag for rational economics. Through day five (of fourteen), 90% of readers are siding with the environmentalist. It's the feel-good choice. It also doesn't help that the "economist" seems to argue—at least by implication—that things aren't all that bad and likens greens to "Judeo-Christian sects."

How would an environmental economist vote—someone who agrees with scientists who tell us that things are bad and getting worse but also takes the economics seriously and wants to do something about the state of the planet?

Funny you should ask.

I voted for the motion—because of a linguistic technicality, and the much larger argument around practicality and political realism.

First, linguistics: the word "extracted" in the motion has a rather negative connotation, especially when it comes to wilderness. It sounds a lot more like mining than canoeing. I wonder how votes would fare if the word "extracted" was deleted in favor of: "enjoyed." But that's still only half the story.

You can indeed derive all sorts of jollies from wilderness. One such pleasure is the simple fact of knowing that wilderness exists. That, strictly speaking, is still a form of utility. The "economist" in the debate makes that point eloquently.

There's also a lot to be said for moving beyond all-or-nothing conservation. We can't just set aside the atmosphere to stop global warming, nor can we put enough land under permanent protection to keep everything just dandy regardless of what we do to the rest. Instead, we ought to protect biological hotspots, where most of the world's biodiversity resides, and responsibly manage the rest.

That's where practicality and political realism enter. It would be splendid to devise the perfect benefit-cost analysis of all the world's wilderness areas, and then make the rational choice to conservation. We can't. We can and should use economic thinking as a guide, but any benefit-cost analysis we attempt will be skewed toward economic growth and against wilderness for one simple reason: We have much better data about the economics than the environment.

We simply can't measure all the utility we extract enjoy from wilderness. Hence, for very practical reasons:

This environmental economist believes that untouched wildernesses have a value beyond the resources and other utility that can be enjoyed—and measured—from them.

The limits of choice

Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants, doesn't have a smart phone.

Steve Jobs, the visionary who gave people options they never thought possible, was all about "making choices" and "living life on his own terms."

Success in life and limiting one's choices seem to go hand in hand. Why succumb to the temptation of wasting time in front of the TV when you could just not have one at all?

Psychologists agree. Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing leads the way here: No choice is bad, but too much choice overwhelms us. Contrast the beauty and simplicity of any Apple product with the sensory assault of the Windows start menu.

Yet "free market" detractors talk about choice and freedom as if they go hand in hand. Being able to choose that inefficient incandescent light bulb is neither good for you nor the people around you. More importantly, having the choice of producing that ancient, energy-wasting bulb technology has meant for much too long that companies had little incentive to innovate. Bulb technology hasn't advanced much for over a century.

Ironically, now that the days of incandescents are numbered, and plenty of players are inventing new bulbs, there's much too much choice for the rest of us.

What people want

Economists consider what consumers want to be God-given. We don't dare question consumer preferences. They are what they are. Well, it turns out God has a name, and it's Steve Jobs.

Jobs touched innumerable lives in many important ways. He's also famous for saying that:

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

He was better than most at showing people what they wanted—certainly on par with the likes of Henry Ford, who a century earlier quipped: "If I listened to the public, I'd be making faster horses."

This fact also has important implications for policy. Many energy efficiency efforts benefit everyone. They are good for consumers, producers, and the planet. And you only get there if you believe that sometimes, just maybe, consumers aren't always the 100% rational automatons who would never consider buying an iPad because they had never thought about needing one in the first place. Recognizing that was the genius of Steve Jobs.

Feel-good baggage

The tiny green label on that piece of luggage en route to JFK says "eco-friendly," and I'm sure it is. The bag manufacturer probably sourced the cotton for the interior lining from some organic grower. Perhaps the plastic handle is 20% lighter than usual and comes from 60% post-consumer sources. Or maybe the entire carbon footprint of the bag's supply chain has been offset by planting a fraction of a tree somewhere.

Good.

But I have a strong suspicion that the "jetset" tag next to it dwarfs any perceived environmental savings.

We need eco-friendly bags, eco-friendly luggage tags, eco-friendly transport, eco-friendly everything. But most importantly we need policies like the EU's Aviation Directive that provide a first step to making a real difference, not consumers feeling better about their consumerism because they spot a green sticker on their checked luggage.

But will the planet notice this book?

This book is about getting noticed. Not the book itself, necessarily, although that would be nice, too.

It's about the frustration many of us environmentalists feel that our actions don't make a difference. No more "10 things you can do to save the planet" lists. No more changing light bulbs and refusing plastic bags—at least not by itself.

It's about doing stuff that the planet actually notices.

These are almost the exact words I used to introduce this daily blog over three months ago. It's also an apt description of my book out today.

Solving some of the most intractable problems the planet has ever faced clearly requires a strategy of all-of-the-above: We need teachers, parents, sociologists, engineers, climate scientists, preachers, and many others to do their part.

But we can't lose sight of the larger goal: re-channeling woefully misguided market forces to steer our economies away from their current head-on collision course with the planet.

Enter economists.

Bill McKibben says this book is "an awfully good place to start."

Martin Wolf calls it "lucid and enjoyable."

Matt Kahn asks: "Who knew that an economist not named Krugman could write so well?"

Rob Stavins says that he's been waiting for a book like this "for more than thirty years."

The Daily Green describes it as: "Lessons in economics and global environmental problems, from a guy you'd actually talk to at a party." And I had never even met the guy, at a party or otherwise.

Read my New York Times op-ed.

Get your copy of But Will the Planet Notice? at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, Walmart, Google, Powell's, iTunes, or in a bookstore near you.

We are hiring, and I'm spending the day on Facebook

EDF is doing its part to ensure that jobs and the environment go hand-in-hand: Join our economics team as a Research Associate.

In unrelated news, But Will the Planet Notice comes out tomorrow. I'm answering questions via Facebook at edf.org today.

Sustainable results

It's always easier to focus on something for 100 days than to do so for a lifetime, or even for a year or two. It's easy to go beyond when there's a concrete deadline. Give up chocolate, meat, driving? Sure, as long as the end is in sight and you can plan your road trip for day 101 to break the fast.

Locking in sustained change is crucial to ensure the good deeds continue even after the rapid response team leaves town.

That's what policy change is all about: make sure there's a new normal, a new way of doing business that looks as promising on day 101 as it does on day 1.

Changing light bulbs is good. Changing laws to make sure that every additional light bulb is at least as efficient as the previous one is even better.

When in Brooklyn

Forget the planet. When you are in Brooklyn trying to navigate cobblestone streets, don't hobble yourself by showing up in a ride that would come across as tacky in any suburban strip mall parking lot.

Speak no evil

Language is the ultimate dematerialized technology. It wouldn't kill you if it were dropped on you. Its ecological and carbon footprints are practically zero. All of a sudden, you could exchange feelings without making them known by hurling stones at one other.

Language should be every environmentalist's dream invention: progress without needing more stuff.

That, of course, was a short-lived phenomenon. Each particular human interaction became less material, but the invention of language also sparked enormous economic growth. The number of interactions increased exponentially. Much of what followed throughout human history was based on its invention.

We are clearly better off with language than without. But it's equally clear that over time, language has resulted in enormous additional resources being mobilized—with all the good and ill that entails.

Fat chance

Climate change hits home.

Obesity hits home even more. Doing something about obesity benefits you personally and mainly you personally. Yet somehow we still have an obesity epidemic.

What hope is there to address something as large and daunting as climate change without a major, concerted policy effort?