Environmental costs
In the business world, expertise teams analyze projects through cost-benefit studies, based on which they decide whether or not to undertake them.
Often, these studies are unscrupulous and overlook some costs. Such as those costs that do not directly affect the project but collaterally their environment, presuming no one will ever hold them accountable. Or those costs that repercussion will be long-term, with post-profit effects, when they anticipate that someone else will have to deal with the problem.
Environmental concerns are the most forgotten or underestimated term on the costs side.
Perhaps at the beginning of the industrial revolution, this mistake was due to ignorance or unawareness. But, nowadays, when a multinational decides to take production to laxer environmental legislation countries (and with cheaper labor, also), it is because of a total lack of scruples.
This technique reports maximum benefits and minimum costs in its balance sheet, but not because of an objective and actual reduction in costs but because of the derivation of environmental costs to society as a whole, outside of its particular business calculation.
But what happens when the project is Life on Earth?
No cost can be ignored or derived here.
And what happens when the calculation period is neither 5 nor 10 nor 30 years, but an ideal eternity of future generations that would never end if it depended on ourselves?
Here it’s useless to leave the problem for later, for the rest of humanity, because it’s everyone’s business.
Climate change is a scientifically proven fact
We can measure global warming.
In the US, the GISTEMP series comes via the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) creates the MLOST record. The Japan Meteorological Agency ( JMA) produces a fourth dataset.
Here’s how global temperatures in the four datasets compare over the past 130 years. You can see they all show a warming trend, but there are some year-to-year differences too.
Global average temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2012, compared to the 1951–1980 long term average. Source:
Paradoxically, this warming is cooling large seawater masses by melting the ice caps (here is why). So that raises sea level and modifies ocean currents, unbalancing the climate while increasing the atmosphere’s average temperature.
Science predicts that climate change is not precisely conducive to sustaining life as we know it.
Life has developed and adapted to sustained and stable climatic conditions or slightly variable over time and is very sensitive to these conditions.
Humans enforce accelerated changes on the planet to make profits that only benefit a small part of the population and narcotize the rest with the bait of welfare while causing unpredictable global damages.
From enough broad timescale, these individual returns are transitory and marginal, as the pass of a generation is fleeting compared to the future life.
And these returns are a mirage because a wrongly calculated favorable result without considering the negative part of the equation will never be a long-term benefit.
At some point, we will pay the consequences, and the selective returns will be fade, as will those who have enjoyed it. And only the negative impacts will remain, which we all will have to face.
As naive as it may seem to say and repeat it, it is a fact that global warming does not help much in the survival of bees or birds or fish or elephants or ants, or crops or forests.
And so, because of these facts, an external intelligence that observes us might think that this predation of gigantic proportions that harms the planet life should at least benefit the species that have selfishly provoked.
Well, no, of course not.
In any case, it only benefits a small but influential part of the population that gets rich by the structure of production processes and current social routines and their dependence on polluting energies.
So, could we be a little more honest and precise about this issue?
Yes. It is not just a matter of climate change. Let us face it. It’s a climate disaster and a behavioral aberration by a self-proclaimed rational species, an incomprehensible aberration on a collective level.
That is a deferred and inertial climate disaster. Because its effects will not be instantaneous, they will be progressive and hard to counteract once started, which has already happened.
Why do we tolerate these onerous punctual profits without passing on all the collateral costs when these costs can destroy the world?
That’s because we live in a precarious economic balance with this risk (destroy the world).
Looking with reading glasses, we only see that we are in some balance (an economic and prosperous balance only in the affluent world).
If we could look with enough perspective, we could see the actual risk (even for the affluent world).
Next project steps
Economic growth?
Sure, but compatible with the climate stability that life requires, because it is urgently needed.
Welfare society?
Of course, but not exclusive and unequal but universal, because it is possible.
How can production processes be changed?
How can a lifestyle be adapted to the needs of a balanced climate?
How can the system be changed?
Auggh!
The dependence — addiction — on irrational economic growth has become too big.
We have reduced smoking with some success -an example of the fight against pressure from large and powerful companies, and an example of change deeply rooted habits in society-.
We are now fighting a pandemic and will overcome it if we manage to reach aid to the entire population of the planet -not only the infection curve needs to be bowed, but also the counterproductive selfishness of the rich countries-.
Unfortunately, the struggle for environmental balance requires much more effort.
I will try to talk about it in oncoming articles.
Become aware of the future’s preservation
Thanks for reading
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Climate Time Machine. Data source: NASA/GISS NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
