Carbon pricing is a form of pollution pricing. But air pollutants from fossil-fuel combustion and greenhouse-gas emissions from a variety of sources are not the only forms of pollution we face.
And pollution pricing itself is just one aspect of the broader field of full cost accounting.
The concept is very simple: Much of what we do has an impact on something — the environment, other people, our communities, other species, future generations.
That impact may be beneficial in some way — providing food, water, housing and other basic needs, improving health and safety, creating jobs and so on — but seldom is it wholly beneficial, with no negative impacts.
Those negative impacts have economic as well as environmental, social and health costs. However, little to none of that is included in the costs of the products or services we use, meaning they are considerably under-priced, making this a market failure.
These hidden costs are considered to be “externalities”, which the Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines as “a side effect or consequence, esp. of an industrial or commercial activity, which affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost or price.”
As the late and noted wellbeing economist Herman Daly pointed out, these costs are classified as external “for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic models.”
Our failure to fully account for those costs makes our society childish, lazy and selfish. Childish in that we act as if when we close our eyes, it is not there, or it will go away. Lazy in that we really can’t be bothered to do the thinking and the work involved in understanding and properly accounting for those costs.
And selfish, in that we want our goods and services on the cheap, and we really don’t care about the harms to people elsewhere, to the natural systems we depend upon, or to future generations.
That, of course, works well for the private sector — it keeps their prices low and their profits high; for governments, because it makes for happier voters today; and for citizens, because it is cheap.
Growing food in today’s world, for example, has massive environmental, health and social costs that are not reflected in the price we pay.
A Sept. 19 article in the New York Times reported on the hidden environmental costs of food.
Based on research by True Price, a Dutch non-profit group, they estimated that the true price of a pound of beef, retailing at Walmart in the U.S. at $5.34, is actually $27.36.
The difference is largely due to the costs of land system change, but also greenhouse-gas emissions from cattle and their manure, and water use.
Beef, of course, is consistently identified as the worst offender. The true price for a pound of cheese is only $7.50 compared to a retail price of $3.74; for chicken, $4.03 vs. $2.20, and for tofu, $2.63 vs. $2.42.
But remember, these are only the hidden environmental costs. We also need to factor in the health costs associated with the sort of food we eat.
We know a large part of the food produced by the agri-food industry — often highly processed, with high levels of salt, fat, “empty” calories and a plethora of additives — as well as the amounts of food, has led to an epidemic of obesity, as well as to heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
To the costs of the resulting premature death, disease and lost productivity we should add the social costs of unsafe, unhealthy and underpaid work in many agri-food sectors.
Altogether, a 2021 paper prepared for the UN Food Systems Summit estimated, the true cost of food, globally, should be about three times what it is, while “sustainable and healthy food is often less affordable to consumers and [less] profitable for businesses than unsustainable and unhealthy food.”
Just as paying the full price for carbon emissions and air pollution can encourage a healthy switch in behaviour, so, too, paying the full cost for our food will encourage a switch to a low-meat diet with many health and social benefits, and in particular with much less environmental harm.
Our descendants will be grateful.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
