Why Live Green

A good friend of mine who cares too much about personal finance, and therefore about maximizing efficiency in his life, will not live Green.

In Manhattan, living Green has become the new anti-racism. Instead of having token black friends and voting for affirmative action, now everyone tries to buy organic, buy local, buy energy-neutral, recycle, buy recycled, buy sustainable, turn off the lights, take a shorter shower, reuse packaging. ConEd, the power company, pays for ads in the subway recommending power-saving things you can do, like turn off your computer at night (good), close your blinds to help conserve air conditioning in the summer and to help with insulation to conserve heat in the winter (good) and think about what you want before you open the refrigerator or freezer door, so you lose less cold (lame).

My friend points out that personal consumer energy use is such a minute part of global warming, and the standards for Green lifestyle products are so vague and lax, that the impact of living Green is negligible from an environmental perspective, but has dramatic impact on personal comfort and finances.

He's mostly right, although eating organic food is probably substantially healthier than eating factory-farmed food. Nonetheless, there are other compelling reasons to support the Green lifestyle beyond concern for your own personal carbon output. The reasons are predominantly economic, and therefore have a nuanced relationship to the concerns that many have over the personal finance dimension of the Green lifestyle.

The central idea is this: Green technologies are just emerging from the elemntary stage of development to an intermediate stage where they become industrially relevant and economically sustainable. Cheaper, more efficient windmills for wind power generation and cleaner, biodegradable packaging are two technologies that are only just flowering now, after decades of research, development and hysterical advocacy. The development is taking place in part because there are new financial incentives to develop Green technologies, or at least technologies that can make a pass at presenting themselves as Green. These new financial incentives are a combination of government regulatory incentives and consumer trends. Government regulations compelling fuel efficiency in cars (federal) and dictating standards for defining something as organic (state) have both worked to spur research and industry-wide changes that led to the development of hybrid cars and of more thoroughly organic produce. At the same time, the growing prevalence of consumers who seek organic food and fuel-efficient cars has created a financial incentive to produce those products. There is a market for them. Increasing numebrs of consumers facilitate higher volume production, which leads to economies of scale; Green products become less expensive, available to more people, and therefore have a broader effect. Additionally, the higher volume and greater economies of scale create more funding for research, which produces externalities in the form of technologies that are useful beyond the purpose for which they were developed. the ripple effect of increased research brought about by a larger market for Green products results in a trickle-down effect, so that the real polluters, like office building air conditioning, trans-continental shipping and other industrial services, mechanisms and processes benefit from research done for the consumer market. As a result, even if your incremental environmental impact from living Green is low, you are having a larger (though still marginal) impact by participating in the Green economy, which in turn helps advance meaningful environmental impact.