Creation care opponents have thrown caution to the wind. Emboldened by demagogues like Glenn Beck, they’re not averse to painting as “totalitarians” anyone even slightly concerned about pollution, resource conservation, biodiversity loss, or energy efficiency.

The Washington Times published a piece on May 19, 2011, by creation care critic Cal Beisner purporting to reveal the “hidden dangers” in the National Day of Prayer for Creation Care, which was sponsored by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). Among their “dangerous” prayer requests: reducing mercury pollution that passes from pregnant mothers to their unborn babies.

Aside from being a worthy cause in its own right, the campaign seemed to me to be good apologetics as well. Here were evangelical Christians claiming publicly that God’s call to compassion and wise dominion extends to stopping air pollution that affects our most vulnerable citizens, growing the credibility of the pro-life witness by linking it to more than fighting abortion (the frequency of which, we must all admit, remains our greatest current national travesty), and doing so with smart, well-documented research and policy recommendations. I personally know of formerly pro-choice environmentalists who have changed their positions on abortion because of encountering pro-life evangelical environmental advocates.

But the most visible anti-environmentalists never let concerns about the church’s witness in the world overcome their fundamental desire to fight even the suggestion that democratically elected governments might use their regulatory authority to protect the environment. The libertarian ends consistently trump the means, and evangelism tends to be the first casualty, with regard for truth a close second.

In Beisner’s critique, he constructed two straw-man claims that EEN’s materials didn’t make; and even the way he rebuts the fictitious claims reveals a lot about his commitments.

Beisner said EEN claimed “the main source of mercury pollution is dirty air released by coal-burning power plants” and that international sources are more important. Beisner apparently didn’t read the materials he was criticizing, because they didn’t say what he said they did. Apparently the Washington Times can’t afford fact-checkers. EEN gave a quite detailed explanation on the sources of mercury pollution, and the relative contribution of domestic and international sources, which varies from place to place (they even provided a map).

But the reason Beisner invented that red herring is that he sniffed out an attempt to strengthen regulation on emissions from coal-fired power plants. He challenged a fictitious version of EEN’s claims about sourcing, because he didn’t want to draw attention to their well-researched claims about the economic benefits from regulating mercury emissions (which predict $60-140 billion in total health benefits, or a return of $5-13 for every $1 invested in meeting the regulations).

It wouldn’t be surprising, when we look back from the future, if the costs of limiting mercury went down relative to predictions and the benefits went up. That’s been the case with other environmental regulations as well—something even those opposed to regulations at the time now admit. Since we enacted the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the economy has grown 64 percent while air pollution has gone down 41 percent, a puzzle to those who predict economic collapse in the face of strong environmental regulations.

Beisner goes on to accuse EEN of being a mouthpiece for the environmental lobby, repeating someone else’s suspect talking points about how bad mercury is for fetuses. But he ignored the peer-reviewed scientific literature the EEN documents clearly cite—again, he simply makes stuff up about EEN and its campaign to suit his own rhetorical purposes.

Beisner gives a drastically lower figure for unborn babies afflicted with unsafe levels of mercury in their blood—but he doesn’t say where he got his figures. So it turns out that Beisner committed the vice he (wrongly) accuses EEN of. EEN cited multiple studies that demonstrate not just how many infants are affected by mercury in utero but also to what degree, and (crucially) puts a dollar value on the health benefits of mercury pollution reductions.

I’m sympathetic to the problems of exaggeration and the nuances of weighing costs and benefits. I railed in the past about the irrational fears some parents have about the tiny amounts of mercury in vaccines, when the private and public health benefits from being vaccinated so far outweighs any negligible risk. Atmospheric mercury emissions are a different case—but it’s an empirical question, not an ideological question. Because Beisner is motivated chiefly by a libertarian worldview, he simply assumes that the costs of reducing mercury emissions will outweigh the direct and indirect benefits, when the best evidence shows that the reverse is actually true.

Beisner is certainly a devoted advocate. He is faithful to his ideology and political positions and tireless in their defense. There is indeed a strong case to be made for the free market and for capitalism; environmental policies for a flourishing economy would be much better if they reflected the concerns of economic conservatives. That case is not made stronger, however, by a sloppy critique that runs roughshod over facts or by deafness to reasonable counterarguments.

Beisner cites, without apparent sense of the irony, 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (in reference to prophecies, the readers are told to “test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil”). Free market advocacy and creation care advocacy can be done with care, rigor, and honesty. When the lost world is watching the way we argue, it is a necessity.

A natural resource economist, Rusty Pritchard is the cofounder and president of Flourish (FlourishOnline.org), a national Christian ministry that serves Christians as they grow in environmental stewardship, healthy living, and radical discipleship.

My questions distill down to these four (and if anyone can find Bible references on these, let me know    ):

1. Is the climate changing in ways that (do, or will) threaten human flourishing?
2. If it is, are we causing any (substantial) part of that climate change?
3. If we are, could we do anything (substantial) about it?
4. If we could, should we do anything about it? (What would it cost to act? What would it cost to not act?)

As you might expect, a lot of furious debate occurs around Question 4, which is really about economics. Curiously, few people seem to consult economics to get answers. To listen to environmentalists (who are often but not always liberals), you get the idea that it’s just sheer stupidity and greed that has kept us from already implementing ALL their desired policy reforms and environmental regulations, and that we would live in a veritable utopia of economic and social bliss if we undertook climate action now. For many enviros, there’s NO downside to climate action.

To listen to climate action opponents (who are often but not always conservatives), ANY climate action is likely to completely destroy the economy, abolish our cherished freedoms, enshrine a one-world government, and (worst of all) take away our cars. For many of these folks, climate action is very costly with zero benefits.

As with climate science, the likely truth about climate economics is somewhere in the middle.

If you believe (a) the climate is changing, (b) we’re at least partly responsible, and (c) we could do something about it (and those are big IFs for some people), then you’ll find Paul Krugman’s essay in the New York Times Sunday magazine a helpful primer about the economics question (d): “should we do something about climate?”

Krugman provides some very clear background to the field of environmental economics, information that is useful regardless of climate issues. He also shows that climate action would NOT be costless, would NOT be catastrophic. He also reviews some pretty complicated terrain: how should we value immediate costs versus long-term costs?, if we should act, should we do it in a big-bang or ramp up over time?, what should we do if future costs of climate change are uncertain?

In explaining that material, he delivers a not-so-subtle rebuke to the mindless optimists and the fretful pessimists.

Highly recommended.

Note: Krugman is NOT a climate skeptic, but in this piece he isn’t really arguing about climate science (except for some asides). He is describing what economists tend to agree on and disagree on about climate policy if the science were credible. That’s what makes it useful.

I don’t know that much about emerging theology. Names like Brian McLaren, Troy Bronsink, and Will Samson float around in my head, pretty untethered to a rigorous classification, all lumped into the categories of surprising, interesting and delightful people from whom I can learn a great deal. But I do know that they are more interested in communities than in the “free market”, and that all communities are constituted by constraint. Kruse does a good job of explaining this. They are interested in what kinds of order, what kinds of organization, bubble up from the bottom when they aren’t imposed from above.

But I think Kruse oversimplifies things when he looks to economists like Hayek or his modern libertarian followers for examples of “emergence” theory. (In fact, I believe Hayek’s views were much richer than most modern libertarians.)

Libertarians have a very narrow view and special view of the concept of emergence as an economic phenomenon. The truth is, decentralized, individual actors give rise to many kinds of complex behavior, including institutions other than the “free market.” Most libertarian ideas amount to an attempt to flatten interactions, to reduce the richness of social institutions, to remove the emergent complexity of social interactions. They would design systems which artificially prevent the normal evolution of social norms, morals, rules, traditions, relationships of reciprocity, and other emergent forms of order. People are moral creatures, and that morality is not purely a private phenomenon. It finds expression in persuasion, social pressure, democratic government, courts, and even in corporations and bureaucracies.

The insights of Hayek and his followers are very important, and neglected at our peril. Highly decentralized, anonymous interactions do give rise to spontaneous order, as reflected in stable price signals, markets clearing, cost minimization, gains from trade, welfare enhancement (if not exactly maximization), etc. But no human would be happy with a libertarian or economic approach to managing the number of abortions, whether they are pro-life or pro-choice (I have done many classroom exercises exploring just such a topic. Everyone wants society to use institutions other than the market to answer questions about abortion. But libertarian economics, like authoritarian government, clears away mid-level institutions that constrain human freedom.)

Institutional economics is the place to look for emergence theory. Libertarian economics only has a very shallow (but nonetheless important) concept of emergence. Check out classic writers like Herb Simon, Robert Axelrod, Elinor Ostrom, or economists at the Santa Fe Institute like Brian Arthur, for richer views on emergence in economic and social systems.

As such, I think emergence as a concept fits the emerging crowd better than the libertarian crowd.

In an opinion leader and an associated issue briefing, the Economist newsmagazine last week (Oct 29 issue) reported on the worldwide decline in fertility rates, which mollify concerns about how to address the “overpopulation” of the planet. (The “fertility rate” is a technical term from demography–how many children a woman has during her lifetime.) In the undergraduate teaching program in Environmental Studies I helped found in 1999 at Emory University, I would survey incoming freshman on what they thought the world’s most pressing environmental issues were. Nearly always, they expressed grave concerns about “overpopulation”, by which they mostly meant population growth in less developed countries. Never mind that the United States and other first world nations consume far more than their share per capita of the world’s resources–these students were worried about the sheer number of people the planet would be called on to support.

What to do about it? I shudder to think about the despotic and manipulative practices a few of the students advocated. Some were insufficiently repulsed by China’s draconian “one child” policy. So many had already picked up their not-so-latent misanthropy in old-school environmentalism–the evil “lifeboat ethics” of Garrett Hardin and others. Others, more enlightened, figured that easier access to contraception would help reduce birth rates, although the Economist article shows that this is rarely the case. Families the world over have about the number of children they want to have.

Falling fertility is most obviously a result of the demographic transition–first infant mortality declines due to modern medicine, leading to a short-lived population boom. Then other factors make large families less attractive, and enlightened public policy has reduced birth rates as a side effect. When stable financial systems make it possible to save for old age and even participate in pension programs, when education for girls, rising pay and job opportunities for women make employment possible, when industrialization moves people off farms, it is no longer so attractive to have large families for economic survival, as the article details.

So the “problem of overpopulation” is taking care of itself. Public policy should focus more directly on the things that make people better off, rather than trying to control their reproductive decisions. Coercive population control is immoral, and other efforts at regulating population are less effective than helping families lead productive, rewarding, and flourishing lives.

[I'll be posting a longer essay on this topic in the next few weeks, based on my recent lectures on population and environment.]

In a previous article I contrasted the whirlwind of activity chasing financial returns with the more mundane health of the real economy (and suggested that using money to chase more money is the pursuit of “no thing”). You can’t eat financial instuments, nor can you live in them, wear them, or cook with them. Like money itself, they are a social fiction only distantly related to any kind of real wealth. Their only real value is to trade them for real goods and services.

So much for the “no thing”. But what about the “second thing”—that is, the health of the economy. Do we really understand much about the real wealth that makes for a prosperous economy? How much of our economy actually does any good for the people that participate in it? Or, put in dynamic terms, is all growth in the economy economic growth? Is it possible that growth can be uneconomic?

Take, for example, the most commonly-used metric for the health of the economy, the gross domestic product (GDP). It is designed as a measure of real economic activity—in any given year it is a summary of the flow of money, to be sure, but “real GDP” is measured in a way that acknowledges the nothingness of money—real GDP is adjusted for inflation. If bread costs $1.50 a loaf last year, and $2.00 a loaf this year, today’s bread is not better. The value of money has changed, not the value of bread, and what we want GDP to measure is how much the “real” economy changes from year to year (thinking it gives us a clue to how well off we really are). So we make adjustments for inflation, recognizing that money itself is unimportant.

[As I noted last time, this is the logic that should apply to appreciation in real estate values. Since the stock of land is fixed (or declining, if you count soil erosion and fertility loss, which you should), increases in land prices don’t reflect real value, just more money chasing the same amount of real estate.]

There are other problems with GDP, though, which take us directly to the heart of measuring how well off we are, materially speaking. Money changes hands, and adds to GDP, when people buy useful products, but also when they defend themselves from crime, social disruption, and environmental pollution. Divorce by itself is a major contributor to a rising GDP. When a couple divorces, the economy rejoices, at least as measured by GDP. Someone buys a second home, pays for lawyer’s bills, takes on an additional job, pays for daycare and transportation costs so they can hold the additional job, and pays for counseling for the children. All of these transactions add to the GDP.

The growth in breast cancer and lung cancer are positive results, through the flawed lens of the gross domestic product. The costs of disease-causing environmental pollution aren’t deducted from GDP, and the economic activity that enjoys free disposal of carcinogens in the environment is counted as a pure benefit. Reliance on home and community gardens, solar energy, and neighbors helping neighbors would cause the GDP to tank.

When kids and families spend money on video games, DVD-players, and big-screen TVs instead of playing outside for free, GDP goes up. When the same distractions keep people from joining civic leagues and neighborhood clubs, GDP goes up. When people are forced to spend more time on the road fighting traffic, the money spent on auto fuel and maintenance adds to GDP. The lost parenting hours and neighboring hours? The time not spent volunteering? No worries. They were doing it for free, and the GDP valued the loss the same way it valued the previous work. At a price of zero, volunteering for the common good simply doesn’t affect GDP. Working longer hours and paying for a nanny and a maid? Counts double!

In the last column, I argued that leading up to the financial crisis, we were focusing closely on things that generally don’t increase social welfare (finance, insurance, and real estate). Now we see that we aren’t paying very much attention to many of the things that DO have an impact on social welfare, because our primary measure of the economy doesn’t distinguish between costs and benefits.

Some economists have struggled to create a (imperfect) metric that does describe the real economy (the one that serves the needs of people). Herman Daly and John Cobb, in their excellent introduction to “real” economics (For the Common Good, 2nd ed, Beacon Press, 1994), explain the history of attempts to get a better measure of economic success. They introduce their own measure, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, which has since been elaborated and extended into the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) by the researchers at Redefining Progress. By their reckoning, healthy growth in the economy slowed in the 1970s and has since leveled off, according to the GPI.

Looking for a single index that tells us how we’re doing is not the point of these exercises. Looking hard at the data which make up the GDP can give us a richer understanding of how the economy actually operates, and help us make better decisions about the real economy, and to use it as a springboard to achieving the first things that should occupy most of our time.

A version of this article was first published in PRISM magazine.

The federal government stimulus strategy of paying “cash for clunkers” ended last Monday as the program ran out of money, and many dealers ended their promotions early so they could begin the onerous task of filling in the paperwork necessary to get their money back. Was the program a success? Well, part of the goal of a stimulus package is to inject money into the economy that will be spent and not saved. In that sense, the cash for clunkers program was a resounding success. [That’s why tax cuts are a poor choice for stimulus (people tended to save them, evidence now shows) and government spending is a good choice (though most of the stimulus spending has yet to come). ]

So it is a bit beside the point to ask “Did it make good environmental sense?” But being beside the point has never stopped academic economists from asking questions, and two economists have analyzed the program, estimating that the carbon savings were very costly indeed. Using cautious assumptions, one found that the program cost between $200 and $400 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions avoided, and the other got an estimate closer to $500 per ton. Get a taste their calculations here.

If the goal of the program were merely to find ways to cut carbon emissions at lowest cost, this would not be the best way to spend the money. But as we noted above, stimulus was the main goal, especially for ailing carmakers. Moreover, there are other benefits besides reduced global warming pollution, particularly health benefits, from air pollution avoided. Here in
Atlanta, about 60% of smog-forming air pollution comes from cars, so we’re happy to see some clunkers taken off the road. (We in the south don’t have the corrosive blessing of salted roads in winter reducing the lifespan of automobiles that many of you have in the north, which takes your worst-polluting vehicles off the road at a much faster rate than we experience).

Just out of curiosity, you might like to see some estimates of what kinds of investments in carbon dioxide reduction would make most sense. The McKinsey Company (an international business consulting firm) estimated the costs for a range of mitigation strategies in 2005. Notably, they identified huge potential to avoid greenhouse gas pollution at costs of less than zero, which is to say, they save money rather than cost money over the lifecycle of the investment. Examples include building insulation, fuel efficiency in commercial vehicles, upgrading lighting systems, HVAC systems, water heating, etc. Almost all the other improvements they recommend for reducing greenhouse gases cost a lot less than the cash-for-clunkers program did.
That means we may have paid more than we needed to for the cash-for-clunkers program, if the primary goal had been to reduce global warming. But that wasn’t the primary goal.

What will be the outcome of the proposed “cash for fridges” program? It remains to be seen, since the details are still being worked out. Old refrigerators are the most wasteful appliance in anyone’s home, and consumers are loath to exchange them before they die a natural death, despite the fact that they waste much energy. A new refrigerator is not nearly so much fun as a new car, so a financial inducement to upgrade may be that much more necessary, and perhaps more effective.

This post originally appeared on the Flourish blog as ‘Was “Cash for Clunkers” worth it?’ and in the ESA ePistle. Please leave your comments on the Flourish site.

One area where smartly-built cities can help is in climate change. A climate-friendly transportation policy is like a three legged stool, and all three legs are necessary for it to function. This year the US finally raised fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, but that’s just part one of a solution. Part 2 is reducing the pollution coming from the fuel we do burn. Hybrid cars help, since they recapture some of the energy it took to get the car moving, by letting the brake system charge up a battery. Biofuels help, since for some kinds of biomass-based fuels, the growth of plant feedstocks uses up more carbon that is released when the fuel is combusted–although we should note well that one kind, corn-based ethanol, may not be much improvement at all over fossil-fuels. And as we’ve noted often in this space, growing food for our cars competes with growing food for people, to the detriment of hungry folks worldwide.

But by themselves, these two legs are not going to get our transportation policy where it needs to go. Our stool still needs a third leg, and that means changing the way we build our cities, so that we can live more of our lives unshackled from our vehicles. If we had an ever-increasing fuel-efficiency standard, and an ever increasing renewable content to our fuels, but we continued to build inefficient, sprawling cities, we’d be sunk. So much of our pollution and traffic is caused by poor urban design, that we simply must rethink the kind of development we promote.

Smartly-built cities can do a lot more to create healthy places to live than just slowing climate change. New urbanism is a movement of architects, engineers, city-planners, and others that is leading the way in reimagining how we build our settlements, and some of that imagination is fed by recapturing and relearning lessons from our recent past.

Until the 1940s, it would have been unthinkable to build an urban streetscape without providing for walkers. Building for the 21st century, including retrofitting surburbia, will mean we learn to “complete the street”. We will have to teach our Departments of Transportation the lessons that should have been learned in engineering school.

World magazine just published a very good article on new urbanism, showing how it harmonizes with values that are truly conservative.

And some creation care friends put together a hilarious video short called “Built to Last” that won the top prize in a contest sponsored by the Congress for New Urbanism. Watch it on YouTube.

Finally, come to the workshop on new urbanism and social justice that I’ll be doing with one of the video’s creators, Chris Elisara, at this year’s CCDA conference in Cincinnati.

If your church, organization, or faith community has done any work on urban street design or walkability, let me know (rusty@flourishonline.org). We’ll try to describe your work in an upcoming issue of Flourish magazine.

It’s doubly paradoxical (or ironic) because the recession has made demand for public transportation skyrocket <http://www.apta.com/media/releases/090615_ridership.cfm>. More and more of us are turning to public transportation in the recession and to avoid high gas prices. Yet as demand rises, nearly 9 out of 10 public transportation systems facing revenue shortfalls are cutting service, according the the American PUblic Transportation Association <http://www.apta.com/media/releases/090612_constraints.cfm>.  You can see a depressing and information map of this nationwide trend in the article “The United States of Transit Cuts” <http://t4america.org/transitcuts/> from the campaign Transportation for America <http://t4america.org>.

Transportation for America is probably the best place to get a crash course on transportation policy. The Campaign has a comprehensive set of policy papers <http://t4america.org/policy-papers/> on transportation policy and how it relates to other issues such as public health, economic development, small towns, climate, and social justice. Use the link to go straight to the “Transportation and Social Equity” PDF policy brief <http://t4america.org/policybriefs/t4_policybrief_equity.pdf>.

Related items:
The Economist analyzes the new transportation bill and American politics <http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13871995>.

The law seems paradoxical, but is quite commonly observed in operation: “Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good,” wrote Lewis, “involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made.” He gave a couple of instructive examples: “The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication.”

In the current economic and financial crisis, it’s tempting to ask whether the law applies. It doesn’t–because our mistake, our misplaced concreteness, was much worse than valuing and pursuing a secondary good over a primary good. In the pursuit of mere money, and the mistaken belief that money earns the right to make more money, we have not been pursuing a first or a second thing. We have been pursuing no thing.

Money isn’t real, every first-year economics student learns. Money is a social construction, a medium of exchange standing in for real goods and real services. (The difference between goods and services? Goods are things that hurt if you drop them on your foot). But the freshman lesson is soon forgotten, and money is reified. We start to believe that it is a real thing worth pursuing and that moving it around is real work (forgetting the first-year physics lesson that real work involves moving real goods).

Much of this year’s financial crisis involves fictitious activity mistaken for reality, even when the books aren’t being cooked. Commentator Kevin Phillips has described in several recent books the whirlwind of unproductive activities generated in the final days of empires as the rise of the FIRE sector of the economy–Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Historically, Phillips argues, when the FIRE sector comes to dominate economic activity, when a nation “lets itself luxuriate in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing, or transporting things,” it’s a sign of the end of an empire, as was true for the Romans, the Dutch, and the British before the Americans.

Phillips, along with other populists, decries the loss of manufacturing jobs, and that’s where he’s on strongest ground. A strong nation has an economy that grows things, makes things, and moves them around, and it uses energy to do it. They can use that energy to build an empire, and that empire will collapse once the real work is outsourced. [The Roman Empire was based on food energy, the Dutch on water, the British on coal, and the American on oil, in Phillips’ history lesson.]

Some futurists believe that a shift to a “service economy” will usher in an era of “dematerialization”–a time when natural resources are no longer necessary. I’d recommend they try to feed their families on Google for a week, as an instructive experiment. We can’t eat the 98% of GDP that is not agriculture. A pure service economy is a fiction, but it’s one you might begin to believe if your mental world is whirling rapidly around the FIRE sector. Real estate trading is a necessary activity, but economically speaking it is strictly unproductive. Real estate transactions are mere transfers of wealth.

Escalating land prices may make an individual owner feel wealthy, but it’s a fallacy of composition to believe they represent growth in real wealth for the economy as a whole, because those individual wealth gains are only ever realized if someone else is willing to cough up some dough. Real wealth is created by putting useful buildings on land, or by contributing to soil fertility. Merely holding the keys to a parcel while its price goes up is economically unproductive speculation.

Similarly, from an economic perspective, finance and insurance are–technically–unproductive activities. They are necessary to move wealth around, make mutually-beneficial trades possible, grease the wheels of commerce, and allow us to feel more secure by contracting to cover each others’ losses, but they don’t increase any real wealth .

Allowing the FIRE sector to dominate our economy is as corrupt as any Bernie Madoff pyramid scheme.
The love of money is the root of all evil because it is illusory–it’s not even the love of second things. The love of money, we should be clear, is the love of no thing.

Real economic wealth is now, and always has been, material. It may sound unspiritual to praise the material world, but a good, redemptive attention to the material world is a partial antidote our diseased infatuation with finance. Because the material world is a real thing, rather than no thing. And because it is made by God, it is a good thing–a second thing, a thing that can be corrupted, laid to waste, and misused like any second thing, but a good thing nonetheless.

Taking the material world seriously is a solution not just to environmental problems, but to economic problems as well. More on that in the next column!

A version of this article was first published in the May/June 2009 edition of PRISM magazine. PDF available.