World Bank waking up to the need for a new energy economy
“The biggest hurdle is we still don’t value financially the environmental and social damage we’re doing with our current fossil-fuel economy. The economist’s term for that is “the externalities” – the things we’re not including in our calculus. Everything from the negative impacts of floods, sea-level rise, drought….”
Signs of Energy at the World Bank – NYTimes.com September 14, 2010, By ANDREW C. REVKIN – quoting Daniel Kammen, chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency at the World Bank……
The biggest hurdle is we still don’t value financially the environmental and social damage we’re doing with our current fossil-fuel economy. The economist’s term for that is “the externalities” – the things we’re not including in our calculus. Everything from the negative impacts of floods, sea-level rise, drought. I would like to think that at a place like the World Bank, which is focused on the bottom line, we have a natural advantage in terms of putting a price on many of these social and environmental damages. And, after all, if a banker can’t focus on the bottom line, who can?…
The world economists don’t put a value on all of those social and environmental goods, partially because they’re hard to quantify, but also partially because our economy is fixated on one metric, which is money. But as we get closer to humans dominating the planet, if we’re not there already, we need to put a value on the quality of our energy systems, the ability to preserve nature, to preserve the oceans and the rivers.
So I strongly believe that the World Bank, which is a bank first and foremost, is the right place to build that next economy. I sort of liken this to the invention of money. We now need to beyond our single currency value to one where the social and environmental parts of the story are equally represented. That’s the next challenge. [Read the rest.]
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