“Unlike the economy, the planet is by nature sustainable and may offer alternative solutions to transforming our global economic systems, a new report suggests…”
On the Guardian’s Sustainable Business blog, John Fullerton of the Capital Institute asks five tough questions on the sustainability revolution of capitalism.
He is especially critical of “conventional” approaches to price in the externalities of environmental pollution and resource use:
“… the compounding interconnections between global temperature rise, sea level rise, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, etc, make accurate pricing impractical, while some risks such as climate change have consequences that simply cannot be priced. Furthermore, the discount function embedded in conventional financial analysis all but ensures that the costs to be borne by our grandchildren tomorrow are not valued today.
We have therefore concluded that looking at the sustainability challenge through the lens of conventional economics and finance reinforces the error that got us into our current difficulties.”
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