New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included

[KamaAina]

Last edited Mon Apr 18, 2016, 12:02 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.exposingtruth.com/new-un-report-finds-almost-no-industry-profitable-if-environmental-costs-were-included/

If you haven’t been paying attention, I don’t blame you for at first not believing this. After all, companies go to great lengths to greenwash their image and present themselves as progressive and environmentally responsible, even while they turn your land to deserts and your oceans into dead zones. Unfortunately, as Mark Twain once famously said: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

The truth is that our current system allows pretty much every corporation to externalize both environmental and social costs. In this article, we won’t even be touching on social costs. If you don’t know what cost externalization is, you can imagine it as making someone else pay part or all of your costs. For example, BP externalized the environmental costs of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by consuming all of the profits but making the government pay for anything beyond the most shoddy and superficial attempts at stopping the crisis.

A new report by Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program, examined the money earned by the biggest industries on this planet, and then contrasted them with 100 different types of environmental costs. To make this easier, they turned these 100 categories into 6: water use, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste pollution, land pollution, and water pollution.

The report found that when you took the externalized costs into effect, essentially NONE of the industries was actually making a profit. The huge profit margins being made by the world’s most profitable industries (oil, meat, tobacco, mining, electronics) is being paid for against the future: we are trading long term sustainability for the benefit of shareholders. Sometimes the environmental costs vastly outweighed revenue, meaning that these industries would be constantly losing money had they actually been paying for the ecological damage and strain they were causing.

[2naSalit]

1. We need a new way of doing

everything. I can see how too many will argue that this means we should do nothing to change anything and just continue on into extinction.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

3. New way of doing everything

hillary and her supporters just do not get it

[cprise]

6. It will need a carbon tax for starters, which Clinton is against.

I don't think there is any credible global warming scientist or wonk remaining who sees a way to avert global disaster without carbon taxes.

[daleanime]

4. +1

[Akamai]

2. Kamaina -- you very smart Hawaii person!!

Very important stories you bring to us. Please keep them coming strong!!

Well done!!! Scary as the truth is.

Go Bernie!!!

[daleanime]

5. kick, kick, kick....

[PatrickforO]

7. That's why we need to rethink how we organize our world.

We need to begin making decisions as a species based on human need not human greed. And a big part of that is making sure we aren't destroying the planet.

It's sort of a three pronged approach - social, economic and environmental justice.

As John Lennon said, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us, and the world will be as one!"

[glinda]

8. I will go one beyond that to say we need to think beyond

"just humans". I feel a deep flaw in our species is that we only think of ourselves and everything only comes from that place. Survival is dependent upon all species. All life on the Planet.

[ReRe]

10. Amen!

And that includes plants too!

[The2ndWheel]

12. That's not a flaw

That's how life works. We've just become very successful at thinking of ourselves and our progress. A lion is thinking only of itself when it kills a zebra, and the zebra is only thinking of itself when it tries to not get eaten.

[glinda]

18. We are capable of far more damage than any animal.

[The2ndWheel]

19. Like I said, we're very successful

Unless we're going to stop using tools though, those capabilities will increase.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. This sounds like industry propaganda.

[AxionExcel]

11. Repubes will do their best (worst) to label this as 'latte-lib' hand wringing

...while holding out their greazy hands for campaign payola, along with some Dems.

[NightWatcher]

13. What will their profits be when we're all dead?

They might want to rethink their costs.

[raouldukelives]

14. Which is why there is no such thing as a liberal investor.

However they could be labelled a progressive. As long as that progress means using it all up for themselves, today and to hell with everyone and everything else.

[The2ndWheel]

15. The resource concentration mechanism we call civilization

is, I would say, the most fundamental example of that. If we had to take the externalized costs of it into account, we'd still be living in small bands.

[2naSalit]

16. Absolutely!!! .....nt

[Visionary]

17. Overpopulation is the problem

Global overpopulation drives this issue more than anything. If the world had only around 500million people these problems wouldn't even exist. There's simply no way to sustain our quality of life and this many people. One or the other needs to go down. All countries everywhere would need a 1 child policy or we're simply doomed.

[The2ndWheel]

20. Overpopulation is a symptom of the problem

If the problem is even a problem. 7+ billion people don't just exist. A whole host of factors and variables had to come together to make that happen.

The main issue would be our problem solving brain. Except we don't really solve problems, probably because we can't actually do that, since changing any one thing changes the relationship of everything, so we end up going in a circle. We tried to solve the problem of people dying for various reasons. As a result of the many attempts to solve death, we have 7+ billion people on the planet, and all need fair and equal access to resources, and options in how to get them. That increases our need to externalize the costs of human progress, as we couldn't progress if we had to pay those costs ourselves. One example would be we'll experiment on mice for human progress, instead of the far more rational and fair way of doing it, which would be experimenting on humans for human progress. That opens up at least one can of worms though, and we can't deal with those sorts of choices, because we're not good at figuring out who gets to tell who what they can or cannot do.

Then you get into the questions of whether of not overpopulation is a problem. The planet doesn't care if we're not sustainable, so overpopulation is a human created problem, just like, say, illiteracy. If there are too many of X species, at some point some of them will die because of it, and then life will go on. Human beings don't let that happen, because we have this human created idea of fairness. We've gotten good at not letting that happen. So good, that we have 7+ billion people on the planet, and counting.