Revisting the Brundtland Report

The overarching thesis of the 1987 United Nations report, Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development, could be thus summarized:

“The human misery due to the poverty of the developing world, paired with the excessive consumption of natural resources by the developed world, begets a menagerie of social, economic, and environmental ills, and these in turn beget more human misery.”

The Brundtland report thereby goes far beyond mere critique of resource management in its systematic (and oft-repeated) raising of issues of poverty: lack of proper sanitation, housing, education, nutrition, clean water, and healthcare (“decent human life”). Whereas in the northern hemisphere sustainability is commonly and popularly thought of as the preservation of natural resources, the report puts the problems of third world poverty front and center.

This juxtaposition of overuse of resources on the one hand and dearth on the other is raised again and again: in areas of agriculture, economics, housing, industry, and pollution, to name but a few. Implicit in the contrast is the quite sensible assumption that wealth is the result of abundance. But there are notable instances where that assumption might be undermined, or at least subverted.

It has been argued elsewhere that we have or nearly have reached the state of peak oil: where worldwide oil production, which heretofore has increased, plateaus and begins its inexorable decline. While a scarcity of oil may pose economic problems for both industrial and developing worlds, the decline of this resource is forcing technological and political advances in the energy sector. As a result, the world can look forward to an eventual decline in sulfur and carbon emissions from oil, both directly from reduced consumption, and indirectly due to improved efficiencies. And it is precisely the sort of efficiency improvements occasioned by recent oil market price increases which the World Commission on Environment and Development encourages. In this case, then, the impending dearth of an essential resource will eventually lead to environmental and even economic improvements.

In the case of coal, on the other hand, abundance of this resource is quite problematic. If we are near or at peak oil, we are perhaps two centuries from exhausting coal. Furthermore, coal is far more polluting than oil, with much more elevated levels of sulfur and carbon emissions. One might even imagine synthetic fuels derived from coal becoming economically feasible, not unlike that developed by Standard Oil and I. G. Farber and used by Nazi Germany. It is conceivable that given an abundance of coal, we have a future of greater carbon and sulfur emissions to look forward to.

The question then arises: how are advantageous environmental policies to be implemented when the beneficiaries of resource exploitation are not (at least in the short term) disadvantaged by such undesirable exploitation. If environmental consequences are not immediate, what structures can be implemented to make them so? “The enforcement of common interest often suffers because areas of political jurisdictions and areas of impact do not coincide.” (p. 47). Interestingly, the Lovins article I cited in a previous post picked up on this conundrum ten years after Our Common Future and in detail described the energy problems posed by economic systems in which a building’s developer is generally not its occupant. It appears that another decade on the same problems persist.

The conclusion is inevitable, if unpalatable in the immediate: “… it makes long-term economic sense to pursue environmentally sound policies.” (p. 334). It is precisely the abundance of a useful but noxious resource like coal, which makes the kind of market-driven environmental restrictions of interest. The Kyoto Protocol’s Carbon Credits provide a mechanism whereby the deleterious effects of pollution may be traded like a (negative) commodity, theoretically eventually leading to a reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Hence an abundant but environmentally undesirable resource can be curtailed by being linked to an artificial negative commodity.

This subversion of abundance can lead to true wealth derived through sustainable development. But in order to do so, structural changes must be put in place to penalize consumption and reward conservation of particular resources. The use of market forces to do so is one way in which the call for action by the Brundtland report has been heeded. The alternative may be that “long-term” effects of short-sighted decisions may be just around the corner.