Tea Party Sustainability

No, I have not jumped from writing about (yawn) environmental issues to juggling political hot potatoes. This is not a piece about Tea Party viability.  Rather, it’s a look at the Tea Party and their stance on the concept of sustainability.  According to recent news reports, Tea Party activists have taken aim at sustainability initiatives, including the local Sustainable Jersey program.   And alarmingly, if the Tea Party is correct, seems that adhering to sustainability principles is akin to planning the next Bolshevik October Revolution.  

I’m no Tea Partier (I prefer beer, actually).  Fringe ideologies don’t pass my sniff test.  Regardless, hearing their stance, I took notice because I’m an independent moderate that leans to the right, believes in market solutions over those authoritarian, and espouses some basic libertarian principles.  But that’s where my ideological overlap with the Tea Party ends - well before the zany conspiracy theories and helter-skelter platforms and agendas.  

Back to sustainability.  For reference, in its simplest form, sustainability is a concept where a society aims to leave a place as good, or better, for the next generation.  You do so by keeping your environmental, economic, and social houses in order.  Environment, economics, equity.  Planet, prosperity, people.  You get the idea.  Rather innocuous as far as concepts go.  However, the Tea Party has taken to demonstrating at Sustainable Jersey public meetings and campaigning for its demise.  At the heart of the issue is Sustainable Jersey’s broader counterpart, United Nations Agenda 21 and its perceived threat to individual freedoms.  Ominously named, maybe.  But in reality, Agenda 21 is just a voluntary framework and societal guide for long-term viability.  

As a party of transparency and free enterprise, the Tea Party’s stance is bizarre.  They should be champions of sustainability.  For at its core, the concept encourages fiscal conservatism and free market solutions.  How?  Because pollution is the ultimate economic negative externality, where a detrimental side effect is borne from a transaction but the price is paid by society at large.  In other words, industrial processes use air, land, and water as sinks for not-so-good stuff but the cost is not necessarily rendered by the firm.  Further, the processes may rely on heavily subsidized forms of energy with hidden environmental costs.  So, if a product does x amount of environmental damage, let’s make sure the price of the product = cost + x.  Consumers decide with their wallets, innovators recognize need and opportunity and enter the marketplace, environmental and societal damage is internalized and minimized, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand leads us to a more efficient, better place.   

Many private and public firms are taking it upon themselves to look in the sustainability mirror.  In the corporate world, a sustainability internal inventory is called triple bottom line accounting.  Here, the third “p” in the sustainability triumvirate cited above changes from “prosperity” to “profit.”  Doesn’t sound very much like socialist policy.  And whether a firm engages sustainability for long-term viability, altruistic purposes, stockholder appeasement, or brand image improvement for the sake of peddling a few more widgets is irrelevant.   The point is, in our modern society, they are doing it under their own corporate volition.

Property rights, however, is where the Tea Party may have a valid gripe with the sustainability movement. One only needs to look to the other coast, where Portland, Oregon instituted an Urban Growth Boundary that called for increased density within the imaginary line, while severely limiting development outside.  Some would arguably compare this to an eminent domain type taking of land.  After decades, the results included valid questions of fairness and affordability, as land prices soared partially due to diminished supply. Voters later passed a measure to allow growth outside the boundary.  Good intentions aside, there are some very real negative consequences to sort from the Portland experiment and others like it.   

In the end though, sustainability is about just that - long term health and balance.  It does not mean the men in black are coming to confiscate your freedoms, nor does it mean we are entering Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Our model system in the United States is backed with checks and balances to avoid those outcomes.  So, sorry Tea Party, but no need to don the tricorn hats and dump barrels of Oolong into Raritan Bay over this one.