Capitalism is killing the planet. Or is capitalism saving our planet?
Loving money may be a deadly sin, but liking money encourages us to be careful stewards of scarce resources. Saving our money by being thoughtful and well-informed shoppers is an excellent general strategy for sustainability. When we buy only what we actually want and need, our money helps businesses know what to make and sell. In a competitive market, the profit motive encourages well-run companies to save time, material, and energy while satisfying demand; otherwise, they must raise prices and risk losing customers.
Walk into a grocery store–the price of apples tells an important sustainability story: the cost of growing, packaging, shipping, storing, and selling them is lower when they are in season. Or visit a consignment shop: buying second-hand clothing, rather than paying top dollar for the latest fashion, shows how saving money and saving our planet are in harmony.
Occasionally, though, saving money isn’t exactly in tune with saving our planet. Besides a house, a car is the largest single purchase most people make in their lives. It’s been estimated that simply driving a new car off the lot loses 11% of its value. But buying a cheap used gas guzzler is not more sustainable than leasing a more expensive new EV. Fuel-burning trucks prolong our dependence on oil; electric trucks move us toward a sustainable energy future. Your money might be causing harm when it could be doing good.
Prices work best for sustainability when we’re comparing apples to apples. If we’re in the market for a Ford F-150 pickup truck, buying a used one is cheaper and better for the environment than buying a new one. But comparing the cost of a gas-powered F-150 to the cost of an all-electric F-150 Lightning is misleading. Gas-powered, diesel-powered, and fully electric trucks are in different categories; only within each category does price have a good chance of reflecting relative environmental impacts.
It’s not just apples to apples; it’s organic apples to organic apples. Prices lose value for sustainability if they aren’t attached to comparable items or don’t reflect full costs. In some cases, like apples, we have to trust a label like “USDA Organic,” to know which apples are which. In other cases, like trucks, it’s obvious which vehicle burns fuel and which doesn’t. Many kinds of costs are real, but not included in the visible price. A farmer might produce bumper crops for a few seasons but destroy the productivity of his land for centuries by intensive tilling, constant production, and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that deplete topsoil of nutrients and microbes. Car companies can sell a few more trucks for quick quarterly profits but leave it to their customers to buy and burn tons of fossil fuel for decades of pollution.
We know that the cost of many environmental harms, such as soil depletion and carbon emissions, aren’t included in the prices we see. We can account for this by subtracting an “environmental benefit” from goods and services that we know are produced in ways that protect our planet. We might figure there is 20 cents per pound of hidden environmental harm that conventional apple growers aren’t paying. To make a fair comparison, we can subtract that cost from the price of organic apples to see which kind are really the better deal.
As consumers, we can choose to meet our own needs in ways that protect and promote the ability of future generations to meet theirs. The more environmentally aware and informed we become, the better we can use prices to make effective choices for sustainability. But until people who harm our planet are required to pay for it, we’ll have to factor in our own estimates of environmental impacts to spend our money in the most sustainable way possible.
Fred Horch is principal adviser of Sustainable Practice. To receive expert action guides to help your household and organizations become superbly sustainable, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
