Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington, which is a very influential think-tank, made a presentation on “The Power of Markets and the Power of Information.” A mild-mannered lawyer who formerly worked with the Natural Resources Defense Council in the US capital, Lash was gracious enough to concede, in a response to a question from this journalist, that the criticism of the WRI by the late Anil Agarwal, who founded the Centre for Science & Environment (CSE) in New Delhi, in 1991, for arriving at the conclusion that China and India were the fourth and fifth biggest net greenhouse gas emitters, was valid.

Although Lash was not in the WRI at the time, he admitted that the CSE’s critique was “appropriate” and that WRI’s analysis ought to have been subjected to peer- review. In a nutshell, the WRI made these estimates by taking gross emissions and deducting the world’s carbon dioxide absorptive capacities - oceans and forests - by the same proportion of the emissions. By contrast, the CSE used per capita emissions, which obviously put China and India very much lower down the list.

In his presentation, Lash made no secret of his admiration of market mechanisms for solving global environmental problems. He cited the market-based programs for sulfur dioxide emissions and acid rain in the US, where managers of a plant could sell any reductions in such pollutants to another factory. The Chicago Commodity Exchange traded in such emissions. It had earlier been thought that it would cost US$800 - $2,000 to remove a ton of this gas; the actual cost has now turned out to be as low as US$150. “It’s a win for the economy and for ecology,” Lash believed. In other words, instead of requiring all plants to reduce their pollution, a factory that is extra-efficient can sell its “quota” of the amount of gas it has reduced below its permissible limit to another plant which is in excess of its limits. This is a typical example of using the market to tackle pollution, where inefficient companies can buy their way out.

In Europe, the WRI had collaborated with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in arriving at internationally accepted accounting standards for measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions by industries. “If companies measure emissions, they will manage them,” he said.

As of now, only governments track emissions for a nation as a whole. Companies have, for obvious reasons, been reluctant to do any such monitoring. Once they begin to do so, they have an in-built incentive to become more pollution-conscious. Shareholders, who are also getting greener by the day, can also get into the act and once companies report their performance on this front, ask them to improve.

Back in the US, the Green Power Market Development Group was promoting the purchase of green (environmentally benign) electricity through competitive pricing as against compulsion. By 2010, it is expected that there will be corporate markets for 1,000 megawatts (MW) of such new cost-competitive power, including that produced by manufacturers of other goods like multinationals Cargill, Dow and Delphi Corporation. The alternative energy sources included wind, solar, methane from landfill sites and biomass. This is power produced from unconventional sources, which are renewable, as distinct from relying on fossil fuels, which are fast being depleted. Companies like Dow, which is one the world’s biggest manufacturers of chemicals, are producing such power simply because there are financial incentives to do so and they find a ready market for this electricity.

Asked how this power would compete in price with conventional fuels, Lash pointed out that in the future, there would be such large buyers, for global environmental reasons, that the sheer scale would reduce costs. Furthermore, producers of renewable energy didn’t face such imponderables as the ever-escalating price of oil, and therefore were freer to make larger investments for the future. There would be “fixed price contracts” so that both sellers and purchasers would know future prices for energy. Instead of compelling companies or utilities to buy a certain proportion of alternate energy to give these clean sources a fillip, as is done in some countries, the US prefers to let the market arbitrate.

Brown detailed how cars would have a second storage battery which would recharge as the car was being driven. “For short-term distances,” he said, “cars will move with electricity. This will reduce gas consumption by 20 per cent. The US is investing in thousands of wind farms to fuel cars.”

Fiat, the Italian auto company, told journalists that it was investing in biomass (trees and other vegetation) to produce power through biogas plants. As Brown pointed out, this would mean that there would be competition in farmland between such plantations and growing food crops. Biodiesel was already popular in Europe; in the US, 30 million tons of corn were being converted into ethanol. Farmers in Iowa were leasing a quarter of an acre (a tenth of a hectare) to owners of wind turbines and earning US$3,000 a year, while the electricity generated was worth US$100,000.

Both Lash and Brown revealed their predilection for the market to solve such environmental problems. However, theirs - as indeed much of mainstream American green thinking - was very much a business-as-usual approach, without asking any of the fundamental questions that the European presenters in Tuscany were grappling with.

The two didn’t ask, for instance, whether the car itself was intrinsically an anti-social mode of transport, even if it switches to clean fuels. It isn’t imply a question of keeping cars on the roads provided they use natural gas or electricity, but questioning the very use of privatized, motorized means as a form of transport, since it excludes the poor, as well as the young and old, and is therefore confined to a section of society. Americans may be unaware that in developing countries there is a preponderance of young people who are automatically denied this form of mobility (as indeed are the ageing populations of industrial nations). In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, at the turn of this century, a quarter of the population was between ten and 19 years old.

On whose agenda is the issue of the motor car an environmental issue, except for the US in particular and affluent countries in general, as well as the elites in the global South? That is why this writer has always had misgivings about US-based institutions which give themselves hegemonic titles such as the World Resources Institute or Worldwatch: whose world are we talking about?

After Lash’s presentation, it took Mathis Wackernagel, the California-based Swiss analyst who has developed the significant concept of the ecological footprint of nations, to point out that it wasn’t correct to imagine that cars - and all that these represented by way of energy-inefficient, anti-people technologies in general -- could co-exist with a sustainable planet: it was all a matter of the size of the economy in relation to the “size” of the environment in terms of natural resources.