Now we’re approaching a new region of the arc – the solutions. Things are already beginning to come together. We spent the first section of the class talking about the environmental problems created by people, corporations, and governments. We’ve stepped back through longer timescales and to larger regions, until we reached the problems of global air and water pollution. Here we become even more abstract.
People, and the institutions they create, generally worry about short term before short term. So if one option is cheaper in the short term, then that is what will be done – barring intervention. Taking and processing natural resources is almost always cheaper than recovering materials from waste, and so that’s why we haven’t pursued these processes with greater fervor. Valorization and “closing the loop” will not happen until resources in nature become more expensive than materials recovered from waste.
This will happen on its own eventually, but the transition will be yet another problem that will cause strife and instability amid many others we will undoubtedly encounter over the next hundred years or so. Eventually new industries based on resource recovery will emerge, but we would prefer to start the process earlier so that the infrastructure is in place. We could do his by taxing raw resource production and subsidizing resource recovery. Unfortunately, many important metals and minerals are found primarily in foreign countries. We can tax imports of these materials, but then we are asking other countries to buy them up instead (at least in the minds of politicians).
At some point we need to step up to the plate and make a commitment. This is something we can take advantage of right now, if we are willing to invest in our infrastructure. Many parts of our country are opposed to deficit spending, but its use to increase GDP and invest in our future seems like a good idea in a time of low growth and high unemployment.
This is just one step in the process of creating a sustainable economy, but it would give us a jump-start in the process of sustainable development. With new infrastructure we can increase efficiency and take advantage of our greater understanding of humans and the environment.
If voluntary standards are ineffective for self-interested industry, it seems just as likely that they would be ineffective for self-interested nations. On the international scale, all standards are voluntary, at least until other nations put sanctions on trade or threaten war. International agreements cannot be enforced unless they are tied to some sort of material “carrot” or “stick”. Are environmental agreements ever tied to trade agreements? It seems that such an arrangement, if it were diplomatically possible, might do more to help than UN declarations.
Sustainable development requires a significant investment, and it seems like it would be very hard for developing nations to acquire the capital (and see that it is put to use). But a nation that is currently developing represents a wonderful opportunity to build an infrastructure that is modern according to our current knowledge and understanding of the environment – it is almost the ability to skip a step in development that first-world nations went through a hundred years ago. Unfortunately it seems like developing nations will have an extremely hard time fulfilling the triple bottom line – economic growth is usually the first priority, along with social stability. Environmental regulations are meaningless if the black market operates freely.
