Environmentally Sustainable Growth: A Pragmatic Approach
Steven Cohen
240 pages, Columbia University Press, 2023
For the past 40 years—as I’ve written several books on environmental policy, started and ran several masters programs on environmental policy and management and taught thousands of graduate students—I’ve seen the environmental issue grow from the fringe of the policy agenda to one of the central issues of our time. But while American environmental policy in the 1970s was a reflection of a broad American consensus, today, America is experiencing intense political polarization, making it difficult to build policy on values that most Americans share.
What are those values? We all like to breathe. No one wants to drink poisoned water or eat food tainted by toxics. We care about personal wellness and the well-being of our family and loved ones. Moreover, the human species is ingenious and not suicidal.
We can learn our way out of the crisis of environmental sustainability and climate change. What follows is an edited excerpt from my new book, Environmentally Sustainable Growth: A Pragmatic Approach. That book is the culmination of decades of learning about environmental policy. It discusses the nature of our environmental crisis: its causes and solutions. The transition to environmental sustainability has already begun. Large organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors are integrating environmental concerns into their management systems. I am optimistic that we can grow our economy while preserving the planet.—Steven Cohen
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It is clear to any objective observer that our planet’s resources and eco-logical well-being are under assault by the actions of the nearly eight billion people living here on Earth. Those of us in the developed world have a far greater environmental impact than people in the developing world, but there is great political pressure in the developing world to increase material wealth. And that political pressure will lead to increased environmental impacts. Our political stability and security depend on the maintenance of material wealth where it exists and economic growth where people are poor. But to achieve those goals, we must learn how to construct a high-throughput economy that does not destroy our planet’s ecosystems. How do we realistically get from the current economic paradigm to one that permits economic growth while protecting the planet’s ecosystems?
My focus is mainly on the United States—not because this can be achieved without the rest of the world, but without our model and leadership, it is unlikely that this transition can happen without a catastrophe taking place first. This transition has already begun. Moreover, we have already demonstrated that we can utilize advances in organizational management and technology to grow economically while protecting the environment. We need to recognize what we know how to do and utilize our experience and brainpower to end poverty while protecting the planet.
To achieve the complete transition to environmental sustainability, we must undertake the following five actions:
- Research, measure, and understand the current state of environmental degradation.
- Understand the causes of environmental degradation.
- Develop and implement a strategy for reducing pollution and growing a renewable resource–based economy.
- Build public-sector infrastructure to support environmental sustainability.
- Change the politics, advocacy, and communication of environmental sustainability.
Since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created back in 1970, we have made enormous progress in using regulations and new technologies to reduce our impact on the environment while allowing economic growth to continue. This suggests that we have the capacity to develop methods of production and consumption that are less damaging to the planet. We simply need to up our game and increase the amount of effort that we devote to this task.
Popular and academic literature and the voices of many environmental advocates claim that the only way to protect the environment is to reduce economic consumption. My view is that consumption must change but cannot be reduced. In the developing world, the demand for increased material wealth is high, and its denial would be politically destabilizing. In the developed world, reduced consumption would also be politically unpopular. There are changes in consumption and production now underway that can permit a high quality of life while preserving the planet. This includes the sharing economy, increased focus on wellness and health, and the concept of the circular economy.
Our knowledge of the Earth’s physical and living environment is growing, but far from complete. Moreover, as our technologies change and new chemicals and production methods are introduced, human impact on the planet continues to grow. These conditions require mitigation to prevent damage in the future and adaptation to current conditions.
We need to increase our understanding of the underlying causes of environmental degradation. In my view, the causes include the following:
- Underregulated production technologies
- Mismanaged manufacturing operations, particularly lack of producer responsibility and production processes designed without accounting for environmental impacts
- Political conflict and warfare
- The absence of environmental values and ethics
- The political pressure for rapid economic development
- Underinvestment in environmental protection technologies
- Consumer demand for products that pollute, growing from the seductiveness of our lifestyle
- Ignorance of science and environmental impacts and insufficient research on those impacts
Once we understand the environmental conditions that we have created and how and why they were created, we then need a realistic, nonideological strategy for reducing pollution and growing a renewable resource–based economy. Key elements of this strategy are providing public incentives for clean production and consumption. Of course, first we need to clearly define a clean economy by developing generally accepted sustainability metrics. Once we know how to define and measure environmental success, we then need to do the following:
- Generate government support through grants and tax credits for re- search on green technologies such as batteries, solar cells, and automated waste sorting and reuse facilities.
- Develop lease and buyback business models that close the cycle of production and consumption.
- Provide grants and tax incentives for utilities to modernize their grids and build renewable energy generation and storage facilities. Similar resources need to be provided to local governments to invest in advanced waste sorting and mining technologies.
While many governments have set ambitious decarbonization targets, we need to move beyond this rhetoric to a focus on improving current levels of performance. We need to move away from symbols to operational reality. Government regulation should focus on rigorous and audited measurement of environmental sustainability indicators. Once baselines are established, decades-long efforts should be undertaken to improve and measure performance.
We desperately need investments in a variety of types of physical and organizational infrastructure. Some of these sustainability practices have already begun. Subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency have been in place in California and New York for several years, as have some federal subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels. Some businesses have developed models where they buy back obsolete products from consumers. Finally, the Biden administration is funding electric grid modernization, and some states and their public utility commissions are looking to modernize their electric systems as well.
In particular, public investment and public-private partnerships will need to generate several trillion dollars for sustainability infrastructure in the United States over the next decade. While the financing is a heavy lift and by no means certain, this infrastructure must be built in the United States to facilitate a transition to an environmentally sustainable economy.
The transition that I am describing will mainly take place in the private sector. However, just as government built or partnered with the private sector to build the infrastructure needed to support the twentieth-century economy, we need a massive infrastructure rebuild to ensure an environmentally sound twenty-first-century economy. We need public sector–funded infrastructure to support environmental sustainability. This begins with energy: solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogeneration, microgrids, batteries, distributed electricity generation, and high-voltage, long-distance distribution. While I am emphasizing the environmental benefits of rebuilt infrastructure, the benefits to our economic competitiveness should also be understood. Our aging transportation and energy systems add costs to our economy and increase the costs incurred by American businesses. In a global economy where other nations are investing in low-cost, renewable energy and a modern transportation system, our businesses will be competing against companies that have the benefit of modern infrastructure while we make do with old and decaying systems.
Next, we need a water system built for a warming planet. We need investment in desalination and the construction of new water filtration and distribution systems. In dry climates, we will need to recycle wastewater. We also need to reimagine our waste system to mine it for resources. This requires investment in waste-to-energy facilities, automatic and AI-informed methods of sorting waste, recycling, waste reduction, and developing advanced anaerobic digestion technologies to take food waste and return it to farms as fertilizer. We need to do the same with sewage treatment: develop and utilize sewage as a resource for growing food.
In addition to energy and waste, we need infrastructure for transportation. This includes traditional roads and bridges, but also mass transit construction, operation, and maintenance. We need public and private electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Some electric vehicles will recharge at the local convenience store as chargers replace gas pumps; others will recharge on city streets at charging stations built into light poles. Most will recharge in the family driveway.
Another key area of infrastructure is communications technology—rural broadband, urban wireless, and advanced cellular communication must be encouraged and subsidized when necessary. These technologies enable the consumption of ideas, entertainment, and social interaction with very low environmental impacts. The modern, sustainable, brain-based economy is built on low-cost communication and information infrastructure. Universal access to this technology is a requirement of an equitable, just opportunity structure.
Finally, as the COVID crisis has taught us, public health institutions must be rebuilt at the local, national, and global levels. We will see additional pandemics if we do not act now.
Without public investment, the private market will be unable to turn the profits needed to rapidly transition away from nonrenewable resources. But public investment will not appear by magic. The political and communication strategies of environmental politics needed an overhaul. The negativity and arrogance of some environmental advocates contribute to a cultural and ideological divide that reduces support for environmental protection. The economic self-interest of fossil fuel interests has not been successfully countered by efforts to villainize those interests.
We need to articulate a positive vision of an environmentally sustainable lifestyle and promote these images through the media, culture, and entertainment. Environmental sustainability advocates need to create and disseminate positive role models and reduce the focus on environmental symbolism and the emphasis on enemies. People that work for fossil fuel companies are not evil. They are simply trying to support their families. We need to persuade and cultivate rather than shame those holding different views.
In my view, we need to reform environmental politics. The transition to sustainability should focus on sustainability successes rather than on “evil polluters.” To ensure the transition to a renewable resource–based economy, environmental advocates need to build a wide political consensus rather than insist on a single view of the causes of damage to the planet. Urban environmentalists should restore the traditional alliances with people who hunt and fish. We should also provide natural experiences and images to our increasingly urban population.
Alliances with religious groups can be used to connect environmental quality to religion and religious institutions. Even if we differ on other issues, everyone likes to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and eat food free of poison.
A realistic transition to environmental sustainability will be a long, gradual process where we change the definition of the political center and anti- pollution policies will be as accepted as policies that seek to prevent political instability and violence. The speed of this transition will resemble the slow pace of change that we experienced while transitioning from cities that traded natural resources to manufacturing cities and from industrial cities to the service-oriented urban places that many of us now call home.
We can look to the past for successes in previous economic transitions and seek to apply those lessons to our current situation. We are developing and utilizing technologies without considering their impact on the planet. Paradoxically, we will need additional technologies to address the problems caused by current technologies. Climate change requires new energy technologies. Ultimately, a half-century from now, we will need to capture and store some of the excess carbon now trapped in the atmosphere and literally baking in climate change. A failure of collective action and investment will increase the costs of these crises and those to come.
Environmental degradation could cause food supplies to become infected, fish could fail to spawn, new viruses could harm people and livestock, and the cost of the necessary responses could overwhelm us. This is the moment to develop methods of detecting and acting on new threats and the capacity to develop and implement new technologies at a wide variety of scales: from individual to global. It will be important to change the political dialogue and move beyond culture wars and ideology. The failure to move toward a realistic transition to environmental sustainability will result in a higher-cost transition when the crisis finally hits with full force.
The transition to environmental sustainability is already underway. Major corporations are internalizing sustainability management. Governments and corporations have begun to reduce their carbon footprint. Sustainability start-ups are bringing new ideas and thinking to the challenge of building a circular, renewable resource–based economy. The transition to environmental sustainability is one element of the modernization of our economy.