The Economics of Happiness

From the trailer of, “The Economics of Happiness.”

·         “The number of Americans that say “Yes, I’m very happy with my life,” peaks in 1956 and goes slowly and steadily downhill ever since.” Bill McKibben author of Deep Economy USA

·         “The stresses on the average household have increased enormously.” Professor Juliet Schorr author of The Overworked American.

·         “You often hear about efficiencies of scale, but the truth is what we’ve developed today is a system that could not be more wasteful.  We have tunafish caught on the east coast of America flown to Japan, processed, flown back to America and sold to consumers.  We have English apples flown to South Africa to be waxed, back again to be sold to consumers.  The whole process involves incredible quantities of waste.”  Zac Goldsmith Member of Parliament UK

·         “Only with a full cost accounting system (a true cost accounting system) will we begin to understand that goods that are shipped from ten thousand miles away are actually far more expensive than goods produced locally.” Ron Colman, Executive Director, GPI Atlantic Canada

The Economics of Happiness - advertised as “a one-hour documentary film that explores
local solutions to our pressing global problems” – was screened at The Booksmith in the Haight on January 17^th.   Director Helena Norberg-Hodge spoke afterwards and answered questions.

The movie begins with the Director herself filmed with the indigenous people of Ladakh, India, with whom she lived for several decades as an anthropologist.  During her time spent with them, she saw how exposure to the “more developed” west created dramatic changes. 

She writes: "When I first arrived in Leh, the capital of 5,000 inhabitants, cows were the most likely cause of congestion and the air was crystal clear. Within five minutes' walk in any direction from the town centre were barley fields, dotted with large farmhouses. For the next twenty years I watched Leh turn into an urban sprawl. The streets became choked with traffic, and the air tasted of diesel fumes. 'Housing colonies' of soulless, cement boxes spread into the dusty desert. The once pristine streams became polluted, the water undrinkable. For the first time, there were homeless people. The increased economic pressures led to unemployment and competition. Within a few years, friction between different communities appeared. All of these things had not existed for the previous 500 years."

The movie uses Ladak as a springboard to discuss the effects of globalization, something Norberg-Hodge says has, “worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment.”

 Globalization has specifically:

·         Subsidized the middle man and causing pricing inefficiencies, so that the price of exported goods are often cheaper than products produced locally, even something as basic as milk or butter.  The effect is job scarcity, because production is in the hands of the few that are subsidized to choose machines over people.

·         Caused urban sprawl as job scarcity (from subsidized exports) has pushed urban populations into the city.

·         Has given large corporations incredible political power, often outside of the countries they were created in.

The antidote, the movie says, is “localization.”  Simple policy steps could lower unemployment and environmental pollution, says Norberg-Hodge.  It is our responsibility to be economically literate and take our government back.  Start regulating big business.

http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/launch-events

Cancun

Cancun failed us.  We the concerned citizens of our planet blue hoped Cancun could do three things for us: (1) set an objective of cutting atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to 350ppm or less; (2) close the "gigatonne gap"; and (3) require global emissions to peak no later than 2015.

1. 350
There is currently 389ppm of carbon in our atmosphere: a dense, invisible fog that transforms the earth into a steam bath.  Reducing this number to 350 would give us a good chance at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees celcius and restoring sea ice and glaciers that have already begun to melt, protect alpine water supplies and avoid levels of ocean acidification that destroy coral reefs and other fragile underwater ecosystems.

2. Gigatonne Gap: the elephant in the room
At the previous UNIPCC conference in Copenhagen, nations made pledges to keep their carbon emissions at a "lower level", political speak that ignores the dire reality of the convention's outcome.  The pledges will lead to a 650ppm - or roughly 3.5 degree celcius - increase in temperature by 2100.  Such a rise in temperature would be catastrophic.  It was hoped that cancun would have closed this "gigatonne gap" between a safe level (350ppm) and the pledged level (650ppm).

3. 2015
Of course it takes time to change a world of gas guzzlers and coal consumers and to find effective energy substitutes.  In order to meet the 350ppm target, it has been found that global emissions can peak no later then 2015.  It requires a 5.3% emissions reduction per year.  If we wait until 2020, we would have to reduce emissions by 9% annually, something that would be extremely difficult.

Green Metropolis

I just finished reading David Owen’s book, “Green Metropolis.”    I was excited to read that according to Owen my hometown – NYC – and other European cities are a model of environmental sustainability.  Of course, I’d figured this out a while ago, when living in Monterey, CA.  I couldn’t get to San Francisco without a car.  The distance (a little over 100 miles) is roughly the same as between Manhattan and Montauk, Long Island or Manhattan and New Haven, Connecticut.  The difference of course is accessibility to public transportation.  Public transportation makes people less car reliant and lower carbon emitters.  Living Smaller and Closer, as Owen writes, lowers the amount of energy used.  On average New Yorkers use less fuel to heat their homes and electricity per person than anywhere else in the United States.

In the book, he suggests cities adopt stricter policies to make it less convenient to drive and more convenient to take public transportation, and criticizes cities like Atlanta whose MARTA subway system has too few stations or lines to really make a dent.  The city continues to build more roads to deal with traffic.  Lessons learned from the past have shown that paving more roads just leads to more drivers.

He also criticizes the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard.  LEED has helped spread awareness about green construction processes, however it is so expensive and its certification process so cumbersome, that so few buildings have sought certification.  In 2008 fewer than 1,500 projects in the U.S. have sought certification.  In addition, says Owen, many buildings like Sprint Headquarters in Kansas or the Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, MD of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation encourage urban sprawl and employees’ newfound need for personal automotive transportation to reach these new sites.

At the end of his book, which I had borrowed from the SF Public Library, Owen is dubbed a “hypocrite” by a past reader in ominous blue ink. I similarly felt let down.  Throughout the book Owen is a staunch critic of the suburban life, of cities that do little to support public transportation and urban sprawl.  He begins by writing that you can’t change the human compulsion towards comfort and hints that policy must intervene.   Yet at the end he writes, “As long as two-hundred-plus-year-old houses in small New England towns continue to exist and be inhabited, it’s probably not a bad thing for them to be inhabited by people like [my wife and I], since we work at home and therefore don’t have to drive anywhere to work.”  He offers criticism, but few solutions, which left me feeling angry and empowered.  Maybe this was Owen’s intention?

Interested in discussing Owen's book?  Come join us at the San Francisco Green Community Meetup.  We're meeting on February 7th.  For more information, log onto: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Green-Community/calendar/15980397/

Friends of the Urban Forest

This San Francisco based non-profit was founded in 1981 with a mission to, "promote a larger, healthier urban forest as part of the urban ecosystem, through community planting, maintenance, education and advocacy."

Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF) works with residents who request tree plantings, and helps them obtain permits.  Before a planting, FUF staff will remove sidewalk concrete and purchase trees.  The day of a planting, FUF Staff and Volunteers along with the residents who had requested the trees, work to put the trees into the ground.  FUF provides all tools necessary.

To find out more about FUF and how to volunteer, click here: http://www.fuf.net/index.html