Economic versus Thermodynamic Accounting - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 47

in abatement technologies, the lower the extent of environmental damage. Strictly
speaking, there is an elimination cost curve that reflects the cost of the environ-
mental loss, which is equal to the value of the best available alternative. Then
again, the public is conscious of the need to protect the environment and is will-
ing to pay in order to offset some of this damage, a value reflected in the demand
curve. The Hueting approach also incorporates the accountant's axiom of “keeping
(natural) capital intact” but to the level which society demands (van Dieren, 1995).
The demand curve is di cult to quantify and in many cases is substituted by some
established environmental standard. It can however define society's plea for envi-
ronmental protection and action. As both curves can be extended to include any
aspect covering the consumption of natural resources, they may also be used for
adjusting the national accounts from an environmentally sustainable point of view.
In fact, the intersection between the supply and the demand curves should provide
a value for each produced asset.
There are supply and demand curves for each and every environmental function,
with which Hueting's procedure monetises the equilibrium between the actual cost
of protecting the environment to varying degrees and that which society is willing
to protect (and pay for). Thereby, the National Income Indicator is transformed
into a Sustainable National Income, simply by discounting all the assessed losses of
environmental functions. The latter indicator has been used by the Central Bureau
of Statistics (CBS) in the Netherlands in an attempt to account for virtually every
aspect relating to the degradation and depletion of natural resources caused by
economic development. Integrating data into an economic analysis, requires high
quality statistics derived from a broad scientific basis. And albeit burdensome, this
facilitates a systematic diagnosis of which measures and at what cost should the
path of sustainability be obtained.
The weakest point in Hueting's procedure is that it pays more attention to
“sink” than to “source” functions of the environment. In other words, technologies
for emission and waste elimination are more comprehensively studied than potential
alternatives to the depletion of mineral deposits, topsoil, forests, etc (de Boer and
Hueting, 2004). This focus arguably reflects a developed country's demand for a
cleaner environment rather than a concern for resource depletion. There is thus no
need for prevention and all that is left is the cure, seeing that as for the most part
many of its natural resources have already been exploited and that most minerals
and fossil fuels currently used within them are imported from elsewhere, typically
countries (or regions) that still remain relatively untouched.
There are also no clear solutions for those environmental functions that can-
not be compensated such as the loss of topsoil, the irreversible and mass use of
phosphates for agriculture or the intensive use of scarce metals for innovative tech-
nologies, whose reserves remain unknown. Abatement is thus more comprehensively
considered than depletion. This is because lay people and even experts often lack
certitude when regarding the criticality of some non-renewable resources resulting
in an ill-defined “demand curve” for recycling, substitution and resource e ciency.