The Earth Does Not Care

? 2019 Mick Dalrymple

Many of us were raised in a childhood environment that included a nurturing ethos in which “Mother Nature” cares for us and provides for our needs. Indeed, depending upon our parents’ and teachers’ religious inclinations, Mother Nature was either a maternalistic steward of God’s creation or was synonymous with God. This story generated an anthropomorphized (big word alert) mental image of nature that provides us with psychological and/or spiritual peace and comfort.

Recent news about fires in Siberian forests and arctic permafrost, wildfires in the Amazon, huge quantities of Greenland ice melting, a massive hurricane in the Bahamas and more, however, provide a stark reminder of other realities: Planet Earth operates through complex, inter-dependent systems governed by the Laws of Physics. And these laws and systems do not care that our complex, human-constructed economic, physical, political and social systems do not align with them. In other words, sticking with our childhood memories, Mother Nature is the strict parent that absolutely does not care if we have a “legitimate” reason for missing our curfew. The earth does not care.

A friend recently broadcast a link to Ray Dalio’s Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed, a deft analysis by an uber-successful hedge fund co-chair regarding the social equity weaknesses of our current form of capitalism - weaknesses that weigh down the economy and create social unrest. A similar digestible analysis needs to be presented regarding the environmental weaknesses of our current form of capitalism. Briefly, here are the key macro issues and what I will label as “improvements” instead of “fixes” because to truly fix global capitalism, we need to immerse ourselves in biomimicry and examine the system holistically. Nature has 3.8 billion years of research and development lead time on us, so we have a bit we can learn:

Despite the enormous complexity of our global economic system, that complexity still pales in comparison to the complexity of the natural life support systems that enabled humans to evolve, survive and thrive on earth… and the economic system does not align with natural systems based in the laws of physics. At the most fundamental level, an economic transaction between two market players do not include the “True Costs” of the transaction relative to natural systems. Because climate change is our most urgent issue and perhaps greatest threat from misalignment, let’s look at a transaction between an oil producer and a refinery. The cost that the producer charges and that the refiner pays does not include the cost of the environmental damage caused during the extraction, nor the military, foreign aid and human costs of keeping oil-producing regions politically stable, nor the costs of pollution emitted during transport (such as healthcare costs or the additional climate change costs of flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, refugees, insurance, etc.). These costs are “externalities” that society or other people and organizations pay. Calculating and incorporating these costs and getting the revenues to those effected would be very challenging. However, a moderately high-priced, revenue-neutral Carbon Tax is the simplest and fastest tool we have in our human-constructed economic system to better align our economic system with the true costs dictated significantly by the physical laws of the natural world. As we stop hurdling ourselves over the brink of climate disaster, we must simultaneously focus on additional innovation and solutions to pull ourselves away from the edge before earth spits us out of its systems.

Additionally, nearly two decades of working in the trenches of sustainability solutions has informed the following hypothesis regarding further alignment of capitalism with nature: In most cases, the more sustainable solution is actually the most economically advantageous solution IF you can bridge two critical challenges:

1)   First costs versus life cycle costs and benefits

2)   Alignment of who pays and who benefits

More times than not, individuals and organizations make decisions that are not in their long-term economic interests nor aligned with the laws of nature because they do not have the upfront cash to invest in the better decision. Sticking with our climate change topic, renewable energy power purchase agreements and property-assessed clean energy (PACE) loans are great human economic system tools that bridge this gap. They unlock first cost capital to generate life cycle returns.

The more challenging gap to bridge is who pays versus who benefits. If the more sustainable solution has a clearly positive economic return on investment but is stuck in neutral, follow the money! Is one department in your organization going to see cost savings but another one expected to make the investment? Shift your efforts to find a way to break down the budget silos for the benefit of the whole organization. A green fund, such as Arizona State University’s Sustainability Initiatives Revolving Fund (SIRF) variation is one such tool.

How do you get a landlord to invest in energy efficiency upgrades to a building if the tenants are the ones who will reap the rewards of improved comfort and utility savings? A Green Lease that shares the costs and benefits is a solution. A program to pay indigenous people to protect forests in the Amazon on behalf of the global community that relies on the oxygen generated by those trees is another. Both tools better align our economic system with natural life support systems.

How do you get the revenues generated by a carbon tax to the healthcare patients who develop asthma because of air pollution? Or to the fishermen whose stocks have been depleted by ocean acidification? Maybe you don’t, directly, at least initially. Rather, distribute revenue as a tax refund to everyone to get better economic and natural alignment started and reap the low-hanging societal benefits generated by consumers and businesses shifting their economic activity to lower carbon intensity products and services which can now better compete on a more equitable economic playing field. Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the We Need To Do Something Now!

Embracing the romanticism that a human-like Mother Nature takes care of us is not a bad practice, as long as it does not get in the way of understanding that Mother Nature abides by the laws of physics. Right now and for the next several decades, she is teaching us what that really means. Unless we stop rebelling and quickly align the economic system that drives our behavior with those laws, we will be kicked out of the house.