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Ecocentrism and Environmental Economics Discounting the Discount Rate: Ecocentrism and Environmental Economics • J J.Discounting Samuel Barkin the Discount Rate: Ecocentrism and Environmental Economics Discounting the Discount Rate: Ecocentrism and Environmental Economics • J. Samuel Barkin Analyses of environmental politics generally come from one of two philosophi- cal starting points: an anthropocentric perspective, which includes environmen- tal economics, or an ecocentric perspective. With respect to any given environ- mental policy question, the anthropocentric perspective asks how the policy will affect the well-being of people in the future, and the ecocentric perspective asks how the policy will affect the natural environment in the future. Each per- spective has generated an extensive literature, including critiques of the other. Little work has been done on the relationship between the two, however, be- yond these mutual critiques; proponents of each perspective tend to present their philosophical starting points as the bases of self-contained approaches to the study of environmental politics. But neither form of analysis in the end works as a self-contained approach. Some limits of the ecocentric approach will be noted below, but the focus of this paper is on the limits of the anthropocen- tric approach, and in particular of approaches to environmental politics in- formed by environmental economics. The key argument of this paper is that, as a tool for making decisions about long-term environmental policy, the anthropocentric perspective under- lying environmental economics does not work on its own terms. In particular, fundamental decisions about the relationship between economic activity and the natural environment need to be informed by ecocentric norms. Environ- mental economics works well as a tool for analyzing environmental policy given clear, exogenously deªned costs and beneªts. For this reason, this tool works best in a static world. In a dynamic world, in which both economic pat- terns and perceptions of costs and beneªts change over time, the analytic edge of economic analysis of environmental issues dulls. In other words, environmental economics works much better as a tool for analyzing policy in the short term than in the long term. But many of the most salient issues in international environmental politics are salient speciªcally be- cause they have a fundamental long-term component. Perhaps the best example Global Environmental Politics 6:4, November 2006 © 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 56 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/glep.2006.6.4.56 by guest on 24 September 2021 J. Samuel Barkin • 57 of such an issue is climate change. Any change in behavior in the short term to limit greenhouse gas emissions will only yield beneªts over a generational time scale. It is precisely this sort of temporal disjuncture between costs and beneªts that environmental economics cannot address adequately. This is the case be- cause economic tools, for reasons to be discussed below, have trouble pricing environmental goods, and the further the cost element of cost/beneªt analysis is projected into the future, the less reliable estimates are likely to be. At a cer- tain point, the compounding of this decreasing reliability makes the cost esti- mates analytically counterproductive. This paper will ªrst discuss the differences between the anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches to the study of environmental politics. It will then elaborate on four reasons that the environmental economics approach fails as a basis for deciding issues of environmental regulation in the long term. The ªrst of these reasons is that it requires us to assign values in a way that is often prob- lematic for environmental goods. The second is that it conºates utility calcula- tions and national accounting in misleading ways. The third is that it cannot cope with the endogeneity of policy to preferences in the long term. And the fourth is that projecting future economic conditions from current trends is problematic. None of these critiques of environmental economics is in itself new. Combined, however, they create a powerful argument against the use of environmental economics, in its own terms, for long-term forecasting. The pa- per will conclude by arguing that the use of economic forecasting in discussing the regulation of environmental issues such as climate change that have long- term, and particularly intergenerational, implications is misplaced. The case for regulation of these issues must draw upon ecocentric as well as anthropocentric norms. 1. Ecocentrism and Environmental Economics An anthropocentric approach to environmental politics is any approach that be- gins from the perspective of people as individuals. There are a variety of speciªc starting points for anthropocentric analysis of this kind, including utility-based approaches and rights-based approaches. The former look at issues from the perspective of maximizing the usefulness of the environment to people, the lat- ter from the perspective of the rights of individuals to environmental goods. In practice, the literature generated by these two variants of the anthropocentric approach tend to come from quite different political directions: the rights-based literature tends to focus on the environmental conditions of marginalized peo- ple (such as the poor, minorities, or indigenous peoples), whereas the utility- based literature tends to focus on the aggregated social costs and beneªts of en- vironmental regulation. In principle, however, the philosophic starting point of these two variants of the anthropocentric approach is the same—the environ- ment is of value only insofar as it is necessary for or useful to individual people. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/glep.2006.6.4.56 by guest on 24 September 2021 58 • Discounting the Discount Rate: Ecocentrism and Environmental Economics Of these two variants, the utility-based approach is the more common both in the political science literature and in policy debates. It is the focus of this paper’s critique. An ecocentric approach to environmental politics is one that begins from the perspective of the natural environment, either as an ecological whole or as a set of individual species or entities. Beginning from the perspective of the envi- ronment as an ecological whole encompasses religious approaches to eco- politics, in which we must protect the natural environment because it is the work of the divine.1 It also encompasses understandings of ecology as so com- plex that we cannot reasonably disaggregate it into component parts, and must interact with it as a whole.2 Beginning from the perspective of individual species encompasses a range of approaches that focus on the rights of individual enti- ties, be they animals or trees.3 Standard critiques of environmental economics from an ecocentric perspective include that it fails to take into account the rights and/or well-being of anything other than humans, and that its focus on the efªciency of environmental policy means that it is inherently focused only on economic growth and does not allow scope for policy to take into account other normative concerns. All of these critiques can be found in an approach called ecological economics (as opposed to environmental economics), which takes as its starting point the effect of economic activity on the environment rather than environmental impacts on human utility.4 The environmental economists’ response to these criticisms would likely be threefold. The philosophical response might be that liberal political theory, which underlies our core political institutions and practices, is anthropocentric. Having an environmental policy informed by a utility-based approach makes sense in a world in which most other policy is similarly informed.5 Creating a non-anthropocentric philosophical basis for environmental policy creates real problems in a world constructed on liberal lines, and generates questions con- cerning the anthropocentric basis of other policy areas. Environmental econom- ics, in other words, is argued to be a reasonable approach to making environ- mental policy in democratic polities.6 At a more concrete level, proponents of the environmental economics ap- proach can reasonably argue that the goal of the economistic approach to pol- icy-making, efªciency in the maximization of social utility, is a goal to which 1. From a Christian perspective see, for example, Martin-Schramm and Stivers 2003. From a broader analytical perspective, see Scott 2003. 2. See, for example, Volk 1998. The Gaia and religious approaches can also be combined, e.g. Ruether 1992. 3. See, for example, Wapner 2002; Singer 1975; and Stone 1974. 4. Martinez-Alier 1987. 5. One can make analogous arguments (that we make other policy this way, and therefore should make environmental policy this way) for rights-based, as well as utility-based, anthropocentric approaches. See, for example, Eckersly 2004. 6. But see Princen 2005 for a counterargument. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/glep.2006.6.4.56 by guest on 24 September 2021 J. Samuel Barkin • 59 proponents of ecocentric approaches should pay more attention.7 The alterna- tive to efªciency, from this perspective, is waste, and waste, of either environ- mental goods or economic potential, is precisely what we are trying to avoid through the creation of environmental policy. An example from the climate change debate serves well to illustrate this point. At various points in the Kyoto process there has been discussion of the extent to which market mechanisms should be used, permitting countries to pay others to decrease emissions rather than having to decrease emissions themselves. There were some arguments (both from ecocentric and democratic perspectives) that all countries should have to physically decrease emissions a certain amount—that all countries, to a certain extent, should have to share the pain, as it were.8 The response from the economistic perspective was that this would be inefªcient. It would force more expensive emissions reductions rather than cheaper ones. For any given level of expenditure, the argument goes, greater emissions reductions could be achieved through greater use of market mechanisms.
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