With oil transported across the seas trebling every ten years, interest in the long term sub-lethal effects of oil pollution has increased. Dr Max Blumer in the United States and Dr J. D. George in the United Kingdom have pointed to its very serious nature. It is possible that in the next decades the accumulated effects of oil pollution will become very costly in terms of fish resources.
The levels of pesticides in marine organisms, birds and surprisingly enough in our rainwater is also on the increase – not surprisingly as pesticides in the United States are a $450 million business, and in the United Kingdom £20 million worth are sold, a sum that is increasing at 6 percent per annum. [7] It must be but a question of time before these levels are no longer tolerated and start taking their toll in human lives.
As little as possible
I think that one can take it as axiomatic that governments and businesses will spend as little on pollution control as they can possibly get away with. Conservationist pressure can force their hand to a certain extent. Political and economic necessity, however, must be the ultimate determinant of the amount of money spent on pollution control.
Thus DDT was banned for 2 years in Sweden only when herrings were found to contain higher than permissible levels of this poison, which rendered them unsaleable. In Britain the Clean Air Act was passed only after 3,000 people had died from the effects of smog in the winter of 1952.
In Northern Italy businesses are spending a lot of money on water-pollution control equipment, and advertising the fact in the popular press to show just how socially responsible they are. The fact is that they are running out of usable water and their choice is clear cut: either to spend the money or close down.
Situations of this sort are likely to occur more and more. For instance, in Japan, pollution is so bad that in certain industrial areas, further expansion is simply no longer viable. Manufacturers are getting round this by setting up manufacturing facilities in other countries, mainly in South-East Asia, though Toyota is apparently looking around for a suitable site in Europe.
We have here a totally new phenomenon, ‘Industrial Nomadism’. Manufacturers pollute an area until it is incapable of supporting further industrial growth and then move off to another one.
The trouble is that growing social and ecological problems will tend to make economic imperialism ever less easy. As problems multiply, foreigners are bound to be singled out as responsible for a country’s growing ills and discriminated against, as nationalism grows. In the next few decades one can undoubtedly expect more and more foreign firms to be nationalized in developing countries, and more and more protectionist legislation proposed.
Japan and other industrial countries that will soon find themselves in a similar plight will thereby be forced to spend ever greater sums on pollution control to permit economic growth and eventually simply to maintain existing output.
One of the beneficial effects of the growing shortage of raw materials must be the increased profitability of recycling waste. Take the example of sulphur dioxide. Monsanto has developed a means of recycling it and providing sulphur at £30 a ton which is just about twice the world price. A shortage will clearly make this recycling possible.
In the United States approximately 23 million tons of sulphur dioxide are discarded into the air each year; in the United Kingdom approximately 6 million tons. This could provide 5 million tons of sulphur or 15 million tons of sulphuric acid in the United States and about a quarter of this in the United Kingdom. It will soon be impossible to waste this precious material, and when that day comes, the huge cost to plants, animals, human health and buildings will be avoided simply because it will be profitable to do so.
The development of ever more efficient recycling methods will tend to have a similar effect. Also, as Sanford Rose writes,
“Once society, by one means or another, begins charging rent for use of the environment’s capacity to absorb wastes, engineers will have to think about pollution control as an integral part of plant design rather than as an afterthought. A lot more research funds will be allocated to pollution control, and costs may go down faster thin anyone expects.”
Recycling will have to be resorted to more and more for other reasons. At the moment much of the money spent on pollution control is aimed at shifting pollution from one place to another rather than suppressing it. Thus high chimneys are built to keep smoke out of urban areas. Clean air is achieved in cities at the cost of causing hideous pollution to the Welsh valleys where the Phurnacite or smokeless fuel is made. [8]
Even the sophisticated after-burners used to cut down exhaust suffer from the same deficiency. According to Bio-Science they simply break up the exhaust into minute particles which stay in the air longer because of their small size. A single motor car will emit about 100 billion such particles per second. Instead of forming condensation centres for raindrops, they form centres for tiny ice crystals, or mist droplets, that tend to remain in the air or descend very slowly. As Professor Wayne Davis comments, “The result is that in regions far from the pollution centres, we now have developing misty covers, which can cut down the amount of sunlight reaching the earth.”
It is clear that as pollution becomes more and more a global problem, the devices used to combat it must become correspondingly more sophisticated. Effective recycling must tend to replace less sophisticated systems and costs must increase proportionately.
The amount spent on pollution control must also increase as scientific research reveals the ever greater damage done by different pollutants to biological organisms and in particular to human health.
Things considered harmless are slowly becoming incriminated as research progresses. It is in fact gradually being revealed to scientists, who should already know, that man has developed phylogenetically as an adaptive response to much more specific environmental conditions than we think, and that any undue modification of these conditions will affect him adversely.
Take sulphur dioxide; there is as yet no legislation calling for its control. Yet we know of its adverse effects on plant growth and we learn from Dr. Robert Shapiro that it has a significant mutagenic effect, and can thereby cause infant malformations and probably cancer. It seems probable, Shapiro writes that sulphur dioxide constitutes a genetic hazard to living organisms. [9]
Research on the effect of radioactivity of biological organisms is constantly leading to further reductions in permissible levels. Recently, Doctors Tamplin and Goffman of the AEC have provided evidence to show that the effects of low level radiation are much more dangerous than previously thought. [10] It was pointed out that if their recommendations were to be adopted, the effect on the nuclear power industry would be disastrous.
One reaction was that it would simply put America out of business.
Clearly, as research continues to reveal more and more adverse effects of pollution, so standards of pollution controls will have to be increased as will the costs involved. It is also essential to realize that a large amount of pollution can only be controlled by cutting down on economic activity. How else, for instance, can heat from the combustion of fossil fuels be reduced? Clearly, only by cutting down on power consumption.
How can the damage done by agricultural chemicals be controlled? Only by closing down the factories that produce them or persuading them to produce something else, and at the same time returning to sounder methods of husbandry that do not require them. This must mean reducing economic activity, which implies more costs to our economy.
How are these likely to be met? The reasonable thing to do would be to cut down on less important expenditures, notably those on superfluous consumer products. We can do without electric toothbrushes and plastic buckets but not without air to breathe and water to drink.
Also the government should cut down on other expenditures that are clearly not so urgent, such as many aspects of welfare and education, defence, etc. It is unlikely, however, that their sense of priorities is likely to undergo so violent a transformation as to render such acts conceivable, though a typical Conservative government is likely to go quite a long way towards reducing the costs of that vast cumbersome bureaucracy set up by its opponents.
Social disintegration will require ever greater expenditure on police, prisons, de-alcoholisation centres, psychiatric hospitals and every type of welfare for an ever less adaptive population. Growing unemployment will call for still more welfare and will also contribute to further social disintegration. The declining health of urban man will mean still more expenditure on our health service and the ever-increasing demand for education will further increase costs in this direction.
Governments will undoubtedly try to make business pay as much of the bill as possible. However, there is a limit to the extra costs they can absorb without increasing prices.
The government will thus have to finance much of the anti-pollution programme by inflation. This, of course, will lead to a measure of social chaos. The public will obviously clamour for higher wages to maintain their standard of living, which will simply lead to further inflation.
As ecological principles begin to be understood and concern with the environment increases, so we can expect people to become more willing to accept some reduction in their standard of living to finance pollution control. In the United States a national survey by the Information Research Centre showed that 57 percent of adults interviewed would accept taxation increases if it were the only way to keep town and country clean and pleasant to live in. A survey in Sweden showed a similar result.
In the long run as industrial production is ever more seriously handicapped both by pollution and by the cost of its control, living standards calculated terms of consumption of manufactured goods must inevitably fall whether by consent or by sheer social and ecological necessity.
The only scientific attempt to predict the effect of pollution control on the US economy that I have come across confirmed these conclusions.
Economist Robert Anderson built an effective model of the US economy which was used to predict changes in 1962-4 with reasonable accuracy. [1] He altered some investment and price inputs to reflect stringent air-pollution control measures. For instance, he assumed that manufacturing industries would increase investment on air-pollution devices at an annual rate of $1-2 billion. Public utilities, he assumed, would increase their expenditure at an annual rate of $320 million and new car prices would rise by 1 percent so as to meet new air-pollution standards.
He then reran the model for the same period (1962-4). As expected, the GNP went down to $617 billion, whereas without the assumed pollution controls it would have been $625 billion. Unemployment was up to 5.3 percent instead of 4.8 percent. Prices also rose by about 1.2 percent.
This model, as Sanford Rose points out, did not take into account the effect of improved technology. This may be so, but all forms of technology, as we have been at pains to point out in this book, are subject to diminishing returns, and these are already beginning to manifest themselves and are likely to do so more and more in the next few decades. Anderson’s model clearly points out the basic trends associated with the sort of massive pollution-control programme that must inevitably be adopted in industrial nations. Indeed, as Professor Commoner said at an AAAS meeting in the summer of 1970,
“We, the prosperous, will have to give up big automobiles, big defence projects and big man-in-space programmes to pay the required ecological and social bills.”
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References
| 1. | Rose, Sanford. 1970. “The economics of environmental quality”. In The Environment (ed. Fortune Magazine). New York: Harper & Row. |
| 2. | Goldman, Marshall I. 1970. “The costs of fighting pollution”. In Current History, August. |
| 3. | Marine Pollution Bulletin, December 1970. |
| 4. | Chemical Week. 1969. Vol. 105, p. 71. |
| 5. | The Times, 10 December 1970. |
| 6. | Davenport, John. 1970. “Industry starts a big clean-up”. In The Environment (ed. Fortune Magazine). New York: Harper & Row. |
| 7. | Headley and Kneese, A. V. 1970. “Economic implications of pesticide use”. In Annals of the New York Academy of Science. |
| 8. | Maclean, Charles. 1970. “Smokeless Hokus Pokus”. In The Ecologist Vol. 1 No. 6. |
| 9. | Journal of the American Chemical Society, 28 June 1970. |
| 10. | Goffman, Horn and Arthur Taplin. 1970. “Radiation: The invisible casualties”. In Environment Vol. 12 No. 3. |
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