Global greening?
The time for a 'Global Green Deal' has come
by Mark Hertsgaard

Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape, but most people are resigned to passivity. Changing course, they reason, would require economic sacrifice and provoke stiff resistance from corporations and consumers alike, so why bother? It's easier to ignore the gathering storm clouds and hope the problem magically takes care of itself.

Such fatalism is not only dangerous but mistaken. I spent much of the 1990s traveling the world to write a book about our environmental predicament. I returned home sobered by the extent and especially the speed of the damage we are causing, but also convinced that there is nothing inevitable about our self-destructive behavior. Not only could we dramatically reduce our burden on the air, water and other natural systems that sustain our civilization, we could make money doing so. In fact, if we're smart, we could make restoring the environment the biggest economic enterprise of our time, a huge source of jobs, profits and poverty alleviation.

What we need is a Global Green Deal: a program to environmentally renovate our civilization from top to bottom, in rich and poor countries alike. Making use of both market incentives and government leadership, a 21st-century Global Green Deal would do for environmental technologies what government and industry have recently done so well for computer and internet technologies: help launch their commercial take-off.

Getting from here to there will take work, and before any journey, it's best to know where you're starting. So here are three key facts about the reality facing us.

First, we have no time to lose. Although we've made progress in certain areas -- air pollution is down in the U.S., children's environmental awareness is rising the world over -- most of the big environmental problems like climate change, water scarcity and species extinction are getting worse, and faster than ever. Thus we need to change our ways profoundly and -- much harder -- very soon.

Second, poverty is central to the problem. Four billion of the planet's six billion people endure deprivation inconceivable to the wealthiest one billion whose lifestyles are advertised as the global ideal. To paraphrase Jefferson, nothing is more surely written in the book of fate than that the bottom two-thirds of humanity will improve their lot. As they press for such everyday luxuries as adequate heat and food, not to mention cars and CD-players, humanity's environmental footprint will grow. Our challenge is to accommodate this mass ascent from poverty without wrecking the natural systems that make life on earth possible.

Third, some good news: We have in hand most of the technologies needed to chart a new course. In particular, we know how to use oil, wood, water and other resources much more efficiently than we do now. Increased efficiency -- doing more with less -- will enable us to use fewer resources and produce less pollution per capita, buying us the time to bring solar power, hydrogen fuel cells, drip irrigation and other futuristic technologies on line.

Efficiency may not sound like much of a rallying cry for the environmental revolution, but it packs a financial punch. As Joseph J. Romm reports in his book, Cool Companies, Xerox, Compaq, 3M and Hewlett-Packard are among the many companies cutting their greenhouse gas emissions in half -- and enjoying 50 percent and higher returns on investment -- through improved efficiency: better lighting and insulation, smarter motors and building design. There's no reason the rest of us -- small businesses, home owners, city governments, hospitals -- can't reap the same benefits. As Destination Conservation's work with thousands of schools across Canada shows, any school district that is not now environmentally retrofitting its facilities is turning its back on a major, guaranteed source of income.

Super-refrigerators use 86 percent less electricity than standard brands while costing the same and performing better, explain Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins in their book, Natural Capitalism. In Amsterdam, the headquarters of ING Bank, Holland's third largest bank, uses one-fifth as much energy per square foot as a bank across the street, even though the two buildings cost the same to construct. But the ING headquarters boasts efficient windows and insulation, as well as a passive design that enables solar energy to provide much of the building's needs, even in cloudy northern Europe.

Examples like these lead even such mainstream voices as AT&T and Japan's Planning Ministry to predict that global environmental restoration could become a source of virtually limitless profit. The idea is to retrofit everything from our farms to our factories, our garages to our garbage dumps, our shops, houses, offices and everything inside them. The economic activity generated would be enormous. Better yet, it would be labor-intensive; investments in energy efficiency yield two to 10 times more jobs as investments in fossil fuel and nuclear power. In a world where one billion people lack gainful employment, creating jobs is essential to fighting the poverty that retards environmental progress.

But this transition will not happen by itself -- too many entrenched interests stand in the way. Automakers, for example, often talk green but make only token efforts to develop green cars, for the simple reason that their gas-guzzling SUV's are hugely profitable. But every year, the U.S. government buys 50,000 new cars for official use from Detroit. Under the Global Green Deal, Washington would tell Detroit that from now on the cars have to be hybrid-electric or hydrogen-fuel-cell cars. Detroit would doubtless scream and holler, but if Washington stood firm, Detroit would comply. And soon carmakers would be climbing the learning curve and offering the competitively priced green cars consumers say they want.

We know this model of government pump-priming works; it's why so many of us have personal computers on our desks today. America's computer companies began learning to produce today's affordable systems during the 1960s, while benefitting from long-term subsidies and guaranteed markets under contract to the Pentagon and NASA. Thirty years later, the U.S. is still reaping the benefits: The cyber-revolution is fueling one of the most extraordinary economic expansions in history.

The Global Green Deal must not be solely an American project, however: Rich and poor nations alike must participate. China and India, with their gigantic populations and ambitious development plans, could by themselves doom everyone else to severe global warming and ozone depletion. Already, China is the world's largest consumer of coal and second largest producer of greenhouse gases. But China would use 50 percent less coal if it simply installed the energy efficiency technologies now available on the world market. Under the Global Green Deal, governments in Europe, America and Japan would help China buy these technologies, not only because this would reduce global warming but because it would create lots of jobs and profits for workers and companies back home.

Governments would not have to spend more money, only shift existing subsidies away from environmentally dead-end technologies like coal and nuclear power. If even half of the $500 billion-$900 billion in environmentally destructive subsidies now being doled out by the world's governments were redirected, the Global Green Deal would be off to a roaring start. Governments also need to establish "rules of the road" so market prices reflect the real social costs of clear-cut forests and other environmental abominations. Again, such a shift could be revenue-neutral. Higher taxes on, say, coal burning would be offset by cuts in payroll and profits taxes, thus encouraging jobs and investment while discouraging pollution. A portion of the revenues might also be set aside to assure a just transition for workers and companies now engaged in inherently anti-environmental activities like coal mining.

The Global Green Deal is no silver bullet. It can, however, buy us time to make the more deep-seated changes -- in our often excessive appetites, in our curious belief that humans are the center of the universe, in our sheer numbers -- that will be necessary to repair our relationship with our environment. After all, even the greenest cars will still clog cities and destroy open space. But perhaps they can satisfy our collective auto addiction while we get first-rate mass transportation systems up and running.

None of this will happen without an aroused citizenry. But a Global Green Deal is in the common interest, and it's a slogan easily grasped by the media and the public. Moreover, it should appeal across political, class and national boundaries, for it would stimulate jobs and business throughout the world in the name of a universal value: leaving our children a livable planet. The history of environmentalism is largely the story of ordinary people pushing for change while governments, corporations and other established interests reluctantly follow behind. It's time to repeat that history on behalf of a Global Green Deal.

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of four books, including Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future, and a commentator on NPR's "Living On Earth."