Paul Anderson, review of Blueprint for a Green Economy by David Pearce et al (Earthscan, £9.99), Tribune, 29 September 1989
How much is a clean North Sea worth? What price would you put on the Brazilian rain forest? What is the cost of nuclear power in the light of Chernobyl? Such questions seem strange to us, even slightly mad. Indeed, to most people the idea of giving cash values to measures of environmental quality is not just unfamiliar but wrong. The quality of the environment is the kind of thing that money just can't buy.
Then again, there is plenty that we now habitually value in money terms that our forebears considered incapable of such treatment — most obviously work.
Many writers influenced by Marx's critique of commodity fetishism and alienation see the history of capitalism as a seemingly inexorable process of more and more things and activities in more and more places being treated as tradeable commodities. If they are right, it could be merely a matter of time before the idea of pricing the environment is. accepted "common sense".
Blueprint for a Green Economy, the "Pearce report" given so much publicity last month by Chris Patten, the environment minister, argues strongly that giving money values to costs of "environmental service?, in the context of a market economy, is the best way of ensuring "sustainable development".
"While there remains a. quite warranted suspicion that the process of money valuation is illicit in some contexts, the reality is that choices have to be made in contexts of scarce resources," the authors state blithely. "Money as a measuring rod is a satisfactory means of proceeding." With that minor obstacle cleared, the rest of the book is taken up with discussions of how environmental costs could be calculated and how they could be passed on to producers and consumers, in the form of tax incentives, to ensure that the preservation and enhancement of the environment is taken seriously into account in economic decision-making. The obvious alternative to such a market-based system of environmental regulation, the simple setting' and enforcing of environmental standards without the aid of market incentives, is given short shrift on grounds of its "inflexibility".
As Henry Neuburger explained in his economic commentary (Tribune, September 1), this is not exactly a free-market position;: decisions about the standards to be encouraged by the market would be essentially political. Nevertheless, Pearce et al sail far too close to the market wind.
When the air we breathe becomes a commodity, something must be seriously amiss in our relationship to the world.
