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When I hear the phrase corporate profits, I think of the fact that they aren't really profits at all. According to a UN report, the amount of environmental dama

When I hear the phrase corporate profits, I think of the fact that they aren't really profits at all. According to a UN report, the amount of environmental damage the companies caused is on par in dollar terms than the profits they made. They just exchanged something for something else, except that the global population has to eat the losses in the form of pollution. Nothing is free in this world unfortunately, not even corporate profits. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-to...

foobar2020 10y ago
Without disagreeing that some portion of global profit comes from "taking things from the planet", do you think that all the value we've created since emerging from Africa somewhen between 50.000 and 100.000 years ago can be compensated with environmental damage? Or is it a recent trend? If we were to plot a graph, where the X axis is the time and the Y axis is profits/damage, how would it look like? What about mathematics, arts and science? It sure has incredible value and eventually translates into corporate profit. For the most part I cannot see the corresponding environmental debt. And to be more specific: what kind of damage did the three mentioned companies do?
ikeboy 10y ago
That's not what your link (quoting an unpublished study) claims: "The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies' combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits"
coderholic 10y ago
That might be the case for some companies and corporate profits, but certainly not all or even most. To give one example, Facebook's profits in 2015 were almost $4 billion. They share their carbon footprint details, and other environmental impact details at https://www.facebook.com/green/ https://www.facebook.com/green/. Their environmental impact is small, and their profits enormous.
sbuttgereit 10y ago
You know when I hear a people speaking like this, I can't help but think about that scene from "The Life of Brian" where the rhetorical question of "What have the Romans ever done for us?!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso) It's terribly simplistic to look only at industrialization problems and completely neglect to acknowledge the upsides. Is there pollution and would I like there to be less, sure. Having said that would I want to give up the safety, food security, medical advances, conveniences, etc. that make life worthwhile so that I could live in pristine, untouched nature? Not a chance. I've life is substantially better because I live in an industrialized society and I'll take the pollution so long as it comes with all the good in my life.
- scarmig 10y ago
  The issue, in principle at least, is that those who accrue the benefits of pollution don't bear its costs. Yes, it might be nice having a Tesla outside your Atherton villa, but that is a cold comfort to a thousand Bengali kids who drown in a flood.
  - sbuttgereit 10y ago
    The principle is bull and intellectually dishonest. It's not about Teslas, but about the nails that hold most homes together: factory made. The trucks that delivered the nails and the food the workers eat... Factory made. As you sit bemoaning the evil of industrialization, using tools only made possible by that same industrialization, are you not profiting from the very same pollution you condemn? As far as those not receiving those benefits... It's not zero sum. Am I fortunate to live in a country that even still recognizes some sense of the individual and is also a country of laws? Yes. But that good fortune is not the result of someone not receiving that good fortune. My living any lesser quality of life will do me no good and will not improve the life of those poor Bengali kids in any way.
rmah 10y ago
Even hunter-gatherers have HUGE impact on the environment. They often set fires to clear underbrush in forests (making hunting easier) or wildfires in grasslands to drive herds of animals (again for hunting). They move around and introduce new plants, they divert streams, they drain swamps, etc, etc. pre-industrial man was responsible for the extinction of dozens (if not more) species. The idea that man's impact on nature is recent is laughable. We have been shaping our environment for tens of thousands of years. Thing is, other animals do this too. The canonical example is beavers and their dams. But recent detailed study of ecosystems have shown that the impact of wolves is astounding. The same is probably true for most other species. There is no "balance of nature". Nature is dynamic and ever changing. Man is a part of that dynamic. Our advantage is that we are aware of our impact and can manage it. Wealth from industrialization allows societies to take steps to clean up previous damage. The rivers and lakes of wealthy nations are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. The US and western europe have more forest cover now than in 1900. The air is MUCH cleaner too. All that requires the wealth that industrialization brings. Poor people are simply too worried about feeding their children to demand that there are pretty forests and parks to go camping in.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > Wealth from industrialization allows societies to take steps to clean up previous damage. The rivers and lakes of wealthy nations are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. The US and western europe have more forest cover now than in 1900. The air is MUCH cleaner too. The price of cleaned up Western countries is that the dirty stuff (mining rare earth metals, mining for coal and iron, ore processing, lots of chemical production processes, producing oil) shift from Western countries into poorer countries. Africa suffers from massive pollution due to uranium mining, China has a truckload of environmental problems, and India isn't far behind.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  > Rivers Rivers are doubtless cleaner than they were 400 years ago, too; it's enormously valuable that we can now treat human waste properly. Dunghills, referenced all the time in historic texts (like Luther's "snow on a dunghill" image), were literal piles of human feces. Imagine where they went when it rained, and remember how a lot of waste was just dumped onto streets, into water, and so on; 50 million people dumping raw sewage into rivers or storing it in heaps, will pollute the environment much more severely than 1 billion people with plumbing, running water, and centralized sewage-treatment plants.
askafriend 10y ago
At the end of the day NOTHING in our world exists in a silo. Everything exists within a system. Changing one thing in a system will surely affect all the inter-dependant components. Sometimes the tradeoffs are worth it and sometimes they are not. As someone here mentioned, even hunter-gatherers had a huge impact on the environment.

foobar2020 10y ago

Without disagreeing that some portion of global profit comes from "taking things from the planet", do you think that all the value we've created since emerging from Africa somewhen between 50.000 and 100.000 years ago can be compensated with environmental damage? Or is it a recent trend? If we were to plot a graph, where the X axis is the time and the Y axis is profits/damage, how would it look like? What about mathematics, arts and science? It sure has incredible value and eventually translates into corporate profit. For the most part I cannot see the corresponding environmental debt. And to be more specific: what kind of damage did the three mentioned companies do?

ikeboy 10y ago

That's not what your link (quoting an unpublished study) claims: "The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies' combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits"

coderholic 10y ago

That might be the case for some companies and corporate profits, but certainly not all or even most. To give one example, Facebook's profits in 2015 were almost $4 billion. They share their carbon footprint details, and other environmental impact details at https://www.facebook.com/green/ https://www.facebook.com/green/. Their environmental impact is small, and their profits enormous.

sbuttgereit 10y ago

You know when I hear a people speaking like this, I can't help but think about that scene from "The Life of Brian" where the rhetorical question of "What have the Romans ever done for us?!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso) It's terribly simplistic to look only at industrialization problems and completely neglect to acknowledge the upsides. Is there pollution and would I like there to be less, sure. Having said that would I want to give up the safety, food security, medical advances, conveniences, etc. that make life worthwhile so that I could live in pristine, untouched nature? Not a chance. I've life is substantially better because I live in an industrialized society and I'll take the pollution so long as it comes with all the good in my life.

scarmig 10y ago
The issue, in principle at least, is that those who accrue the benefits of pollution don't bear its costs. Yes, it might be nice having a Tesla outside your Atherton villa, but that is a cold comfort to a thousand Bengali kids who drown in a flood.
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  The principle is bull and intellectually dishonest. It's not about Teslas, but about the nails that hold most homes together: factory made. The trucks that delivered the nails and the food the workers eat... Factory made. As you sit bemoaning the evil of industrialization, using tools only made possible by that same industrialization, are you not profiting from the very same pollution you condemn? As far as those not receiving those benefits... It's not zero sum. Am I fortunate to live in a country that even still recognizes some sense of the individual and is also a country of laws? Yes. But that good fortune is not the result of someone not receiving that good fortune. My living any lesser quality of life will do me no good and will not improve the life of those poor Bengali kids in any way.

rmah 10y ago

Even hunter-gatherers have HUGE impact on the environment. They often set fires to clear underbrush in forests (making hunting easier) or wildfires in grasslands to drive herds of animals (again for hunting). They move around and introduce new plants, they divert streams, they drain swamps, etc, etc. pre-industrial man was responsible for the extinction of dozens (if not more) species. The idea that man's impact on nature is recent is laughable. We have been shaping our environment for tens of thousands of years. Thing is, other animals do this too. The canonical example is beavers and their dams. But recent detailed study of ecosystems have shown that the impact of wolves is astounding. The same is probably true for most other species. There is no "balance of nature". Nature is dynamic and ever changing. Man is a part of that dynamic. Our advantage is that we are aware of our impact and can manage it. Wealth from industrialization allows societies to take steps to clean up previous damage. The rivers and lakes of wealthy nations are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. The US and western europe have more forest cover now than in 1900. The air is MUCH cleaner too. All that requires the wealth that industrialization brings. Poor people are simply too worried about feeding their children to demand that there are pretty forests and parks to go camping in.

mschuster91 10y ago
> Wealth from industrialization allows societies to take steps to clean up previous damage. The rivers and lakes of wealthy nations are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. The US and western europe have more forest cover now than in 1900. The air is MUCH cleaner too. The price of cleaned up Western countries is that the dirty stuff (mining rare earth metals, mining for coal and iron, ore processing, lots of chemical production processes, producing oil) shift from Western countries into poorer countries. Africa suffers from massive pollution due to uranium mining, China has a truckload of environmental problems, and India isn't far behind.
clock_tower 10y ago
> Rivers Rivers are doubtless cleaner than they were 400 years ago, too; it's enormously valuable that we can now treat human waste properly. Dunghills, referenced all the time in historic texts (like Luther's "snow on a dunghill" image), were literal piles of human feces. Imagine where they went when it rained, and remember how a lot of waste was just dumped onto streets, into water, and so on; 50 million people dumping raw sewage into rivers or storing it in heaps, will pollute the environment much more severely than 1 billion people with plumbing, running water, and centralized sewage-treatment plants.

askafriend 10y ago

At the end of the day NOTHING in our world exists in a silo. Everything exists within a system. Changing one thing in a system will surely affect all the inter-dependant components. Sometimes the tradeoffs are worth it and sometimes they are not. As someone here mentioned, even hunter-gatherers had a huge impact on the environment.