Читать книгу What is Environmental Politics? - Elizabeth R. DeSombre - Страница 9

Environmental problems are externalities: unintended, and unpriced, consequences of other things people are trying to do. Outside of bad superhero movies, no one wakes up in the morning and decides to create smog or deplete an entire species. No one intends to cause, or even contribute to, global climate change.

Likewise, no one plans to contribute to a huge patch of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; people are simply seeking a way to carry groceries home or drink iced tea. The plastic bags or cups that may be given out for free allow people to accomplish those goals but, eventually, create a set of harms the user did not intend and may not even be aware of. The pollution caused from generating the energy people use is not something anyone plans or even wants to create; we simply want to be able to heat our homes, transport our family members, or see at night.

Externalities are experienced primarily by people other than the ones who get the benefit of the activity that caused them. That means the people doing an activity rarely take its externalities into consideration. If every time someone drank coffee in a disposable cup another tree in her yard disappeared and her drinking water became more contaminated with chemical pollution, she would quickly decide not to use disposable cups. Instead, those effects are most likely felt by people far away, in both space and time, from the coffee drinker. She is probably unaware of them and doesn’t directly experience any of the downsides of her cup use.

Externalities can be either positive or negative. You can create unintended consequences from your activities that are beneficial to others; they are externalities because they are not intended when you choose to undertake the activity, and they do not affect the cost of your actions. Someone who plants flowers for her own enjoyment may create positive externalities in the neighborhood; those who pass by may enjoy seeing or smelling the flowers, and the flowers may create beneficial habitat for butterflies or bees.

The flower example illustrates another concept: whether an externality is positive or negative depends on the perspective of those who experience it. The same flowers that give one neighbor pleasure may contribute to the allergies of a different neighbor. When we discuss the role of externalities in creating environmental problems, we are concerned primarily about negative externalities, so those are the ones that are discussed in this book.

The “unpriced” aspect of externalities has several important implications. First, it means that the person causing the externality doesn’t bear a cost for doing it. The sulfur dioxide pollution from coal burned to create electricity doesn’t factor into the price paid by the electricity generator or the consumer. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cost from that pollution. People get asthma and generate costs for doctors and drugs; employers lose money when their employees take sick days. The acid rain that results causes buildings to disintegrate and plants to die, among many other effects. Someone bears that cost, but it is not the generator of the electricity or (primarily) the people who use it.

In other words, it doesn’t cost any more to do what you’re doing in a way that causes pollution than in a way that doesn’t. For that reason, most people don’t even notice that they’re causing externalities (which is different from how they might notice if they left a water faucet on and would therefore get a much higher water bill). In fact, precisely because of the unpriced nature of externalities, it would almost always cost more to stop creating externalities than to continue to create them, at least initially, for whoever is creating them.

People don’t experience much, if any, of the harm from the externalities to which they contribute; that’s part of why they are considered to be external. There are several reasons that those who create them are unlikely to suffer from these externalities. The first is that there’s usually a disconnect in time and space from where an action takes place and where the results are felt. The sulfur dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power plant travel hundreds of miles in the air from where they are emitted, so the people experiencing their effects are rarely the same people using the electricity. (Even if the effects are felt locally, they are felt by many people, regardless of how much electricity each uses.) Other environmental issues take a while to be felt. Ozone depletion was caused by chemicals (used in refrigeration and electronics production) that had to make their way a long distance into the stratosphere, and to accumulate in significant enough quantities, to make a difference that we would notice on earth. Some of those chemicals, like some of the substances that cause global climate change, can persist for hundreds of years or more in the atmosphere, causing environmental problems generations after they were initially released.

Some externalities are more removed than others from the activities that create them. Someone who fishes does not intend to cause the depletion of a fishery but does intend to take fish. Someone using nitrogen fertilizers in the Midwest of the United States is simply trying to grow crops more successfully, conceptually unrelated to the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that result when too much nitrogen or phosphorus in the water causes algal blooms that use the available oxygen and make areas of the ocean unable to support life. How closely connected an activity is to the externality it creates can influence the likelihood of causing it in several ways, which are discussed further below.

Figuring out how to prevent externalities is key to avoiding or addressing environmental problems. Because of the nature of environmental problems as externalities, finding ways to accomplish the same underlying goal without creating the externality is likely, at least initially, to cost more. That is because of the “unpriced” aspect of externalities. If there is no cost to putting sulfur dioxide into the air, then burning coal to produce electricity gets all the benefits of the electricity for those who produce or use the electricity without their having to pay for the downsides of that coal burning. Generating electricity in a way that doesn’t create sulfur dioxide emissions requires either using a different, more costly, input in areas where coal may be cheap or installing “scrubbers” to take the sulfur dioxide out of the emissions; those scrubbers have a cost and also make the electricity generation less efficient. Producing electricity in a different way is therefore likely to be more costly; if that were not the case, the change would have likely already been made. (That’s the upside of the unintended aspect of externalities: because you’re not trying to create them, if it were possible to do the thing you’re trying to do just as easily without creating them, you’d be happy to do it.)

That additional cost means that people or businesses are not likely to change their behavior to avoid creating externalities of their own accord. Policy can therefore play a central role in making that change happen; in many countries power plants are required by law to remove the sulfur dioxide from their emissions. But in the same way that people or businesses resist deciding on their own to stop creating externalities, they are likely to oppose policy action to prevent them from creating externalities. That’s where politics comes in – the struggle among different people with differing opinions on what should be done. The question of what businesses or people should be required to do, or prohibited from doing, is a political decision.

The economist Ronald Coase argued that externalities can sometimes be addressed without policy intervention. His logic rests on the important observation that externalities are reciprocal. They connect at least two different actors: the one creating the externality and the one it affects. One of the examples he uses is the effect of a cattle ranch next to a farm; the straying cattle can trample the crops and cause damage to the farm. That damage is an externality; it is unintended and the rancher doesn’t suffer any cost from the straying cattle unless someone creates a rule that requires the herder to compensate for, or prevent, the damage. As is obvious, there would be no damage to the crops without the straying cattle. But, as Coase also points out, it is also true that “there would be no crop damage without the crops.”¹ In other words, the rancher is affected by the presence of the farmer as well as the other way around.

This reciprocal relationship means that, in the same way that the farmer is negatively affected by the behavior of the rancher, the rancher would be negatively affected by having to change her behavior to avoid the damage her cows are doing to the crops. If there is value in ranching, to the rancher or to the community, then simply requiring the rancher to stop creating the externality may not be the best collective solution.

The most common way to address problems created from externalities is to regulate the action that is producing them. The rancher, in this instance, could be compelled to fence her property or be required to pay compensation for any crop damage. The reciprocal element of externalities creates opportunities to address these unintended consequences in ways other than governmental intervention, however. The farmers could work together to put up a fence to keep the cows out. If the cost of the fence was less than the cost of the damage from the cows, it might be worthwhile to the farmers to work together to put one up, especially if there were no existing rule that prevented the rancher from causing damage. The farmers could even pool their money to offer a certain amount to the rancher to persuade her not to buy another cow. For the farmers, again, this solution would be worthwhile if the amount of damage avoided would be greater than the cost they would have to pay. For the rancher, it would be worthwhile to take money in return for not getting another cow if the amount earned from the cow would be less than the amount the farmers offered. There might be a situation in which both parties are better off than either would be without that privately agreed solution.

Depending on your perspective, creating this type of solution might not appear “fair.” It may not seem reasonable that a farmer who is being harmed by someone else’s activity should have to be the one to take on the cost of preventing the problem. But what Coase is pointing out is that, in the absence of a political solution that regulates the rancher, the farmers still have some ability to improve their situation on their own. And, to the rancher, a newly created set of farms that affect her ranching operations also might not seem “fair.”

“Coasian” solutions to the problem – addressing externalities without government action – do have some conditions that need to be met before they are likely to happen. First, everyone needs to have full information about the costs and the benefits of the externality and any potential solutions to it. Second, any agreement that the parties reach needs to be enforceable; if the farmers pay the rancher not to get another cow and the rancher gets one anyway (and there’s no recourse), this type of solution will not be pursued in the future. Third, what Coase calls “transaction costs” – the difficulties and actual costs of pursuing the solution – need to be minimized.

Even if the conditions Coase outlines are not likely to be met in most cases of environmental externalities, there are some important implications of his argument. First, working to improve those conditions can be useful not only in their own right but because they can help communities be more willing to address environmental externalities on their own. Reducing transaction costs – perhaps by holding a neighborhood meeting and providing childcare – can make it easier for the sufferers of an externality to organize. Making information transparent is a good thing in its own right and can help the process of figuring out what the best solution collectively would be. Doing these things can also make communities less resistant to policy to address the externalities in the first place, because they better understand both the actual long-term costs and benefits of changing behavior and the underlying environmental problem.

Finally, implicit in the Coase Theorem is the idea that we don’t necessarily want to aim for a situation in which no externalities are produced at all. That sounds counterintuitive: if externalities are negative, wouldn’t we want them to be eliminated? But the activity that creates externalities frequently has value, and efforts to reduce the externalities produced will also reduce the amount of that activity. Electricity generation frequently causes environmental damage, but electricity is central to important endeavors. A manufacturing plant that produces pollution may be making life-saving medical equipment. Stopping electricity generation or manufacturing in order to prevent the externalities they create would not be a good solution. So even when regulations are created through a political process to manage the problem of externalities, it is likely that externalities will not be entirely eliminated. That is especially true because those who are responsible for creating the externalities will participate politically to minimize the harm they experience from any changes required to minimize the externality.

The excess cost from what people refer to as “internalizing externalities” (in other words, from making the producer of the externalities bear a cost from creating them) may be only in the short term. Over time, the cost of preventing externalities will likely decrease. Innovation can create new ways to accomplish the same goals at a lower cost, and that kind of innovation is likely to happen when many industries need to minimize the pollution they create because of new rules. The initial cost the industry or business may have to bear from regulation is real – and is the reason these actors may fight against regulation – but over time the costs may decrease.