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The Meme Machine
Ecologist, The, April, 2000 by Kalle Lasn
METAMEME 3: THE TRUE-COST MARKETPLACE
'In the global marketplace of the future, the price of every product must tell the ecological truth.'
Progressive economists and the activist left continue to push for various 'eco' and 'carbon' taxes that would punish polluters by hitting them in the wallet. In my opinion, this approach is shortsighted. I say, let's have an across-the-board pricing system that tells the ecological truth and let the marketplace sort things out.
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Take the car. More than any other product, it stands as a symbol of the need for a true-cost marketplace, in which the price you pay reflects all the costs of production and operation. That doesn't just mean paying the manufacturing cost plus markup, plus extras. It means paying for the pollution, for building and maintaining the roads, for the medical costs of accidents and the noise and the aesthetic degradation caused by urban sprawl.
The true cost of a car must also include the real but hard-to-estimate cost to future generations of dealing with the oil depletion and climate change the car is creating today. If we add up the best available estimates, we come to a startling conclusion: the fossil-fuel-based automobile industry is being subsidised by unborn generations to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Why should our children have to pay to clean up our mess?
In the true-cost marketplace of the future, no one will prevent you from driving. You'll simply have to pay the real cost of piloting your car around. Your private automobile could cost around $100,000. And a tankful of gas, $250.
Moving over a 15-year period towards true-cost transportation would force us to reinvent the way we get around. Enormous public demand for monorails, bullet trains, subways and streetcars would emerge. Carmakers would design eco-friendly alternatives: vehicles that recycle their own energy, human-and-fuel-powered hybrids, lightweight solar vehicles. Citizens would demand more bike lanes, pedestrian paths and car-free downtowns. A paradigm shift in urban planning would then ensue.
I envision a global, true-cost marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth. The price of a pack of cigarettes will include the extra burden it places on our health-care system; the price of an avocado will reflect the real cost of flying it over thousands of miles to our supermarkets; the price of nuclear energy will include the estimated cost (and risk) of storing the radioactive waste in the Earth's crust for millions of years.
True-cost is a solution that almost all political persuasions can agree with. Conservatives like the idea because it's a logical extension of their free-market philosophy. Progressives like it because it involves a radical restructuring of the status quo. Governments like it because it gives them a vital new function to fulfil: that of calculating the true-costs of products, levying ecotaxes and managing our bio-economic affairs for the long term. And environmentalists like it because it may be the only way to achieve sustainability in our lifetimes.
