The Overhead Wire Daily | May 7th, 2024 | Environmental Accounting
First let me offer a super congrats to Elaine Clegg on getting nominated to the Amtrak Board! Very exciting.
Second, today a piece in Grist jumped out at me, especially after sharing yesterday’s article about a new way to measure GDP around health and happiness by Lloyd Alter. The Grist article discussed the use of natural capital by industries and a new report that asks whether industries would be profitable if they had to pay the full costs of what they used from the Earth. From the analysis, it turns out they don’t, to the tune of $7.3 trillion a year, a huge chunk of global GDP as it’s currently measured.
Of course this is a bit abstract, but it got me thinking about how much we don’t account for a lot of the deeper environmental impacts of transportation and city projects and makes me wonder what a true accounting of our consumption might look like on a more micro level than whole regional industries like coal or farming covered in the report.
As I found out when we chatted with Paula DiPerna for her book Pricing the Priceless, the head of the sportswear company Puma actually did this once, and found by creating an environmental profit and loss statement that the company was in the negative when it comes to natural resources needed to operate the company.
So then for a transportation profit and loss statement, what if we included true land consumption from sprawl and the impact of that to air quality and health outcomes? What if we included the loss of clean water from runoff mixed with motor oil or fine particulates. Or what if cars and trucks and bikes had to account for the ecological costs of plastic pollution or metals extraction? It would probably upend our whole system as we currently see it and thus probably looks pretty scary to anyone with money and power that could be remotely impacted. But it might be an exercise worth doing, if only to understand how much value we’ve extracted from the natural world.
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