Page 27 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

6 CHAPTER 1

It draws rural, agricultural work forces into large urban areas, putting added pressure
on these cities as every week 1.4 million people are drawn into the world’s slums and
favelas, while moving developing economies away from local subsistence food pro-
duction and toward greater use of farm land for cash crop exports.
The intense competition to reduce the cost of goods has gone hand-in-hand with
similarly intense competition for capital. With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods
talks on currency regulation in the mid-1970s, capital began to move fluidly across
national borders in search of the best returns. Institutional investors, particularly pen-
sion funds, became the predominant holders of stock, with high expectations of return
from quarter to quarter. Those CEOs who delivered on such high expectations were
compensated richly. Those who did not were fired. Among other things, such compet-
itive pressures have spilled over into government, as businesses invest more and more
dollars in an effort to shape legislation and regulation that will give them a competi-
tive advantage in the marketplace.
While consumers and investors have gained by this global competition in the form
of lower prices of goods and strong economic returns, most citizens have lost ground
both financially and in terms of their overall welfare. The robust growth of capitalism
has benefited only a few at the very top of the food chain, while the median income
of American households has remained largely static for the past three decades.
Moreover, most citizens have come to see that government, once careful to balance
economic power with other considerations, is no longer looking after their interests.
Such indifference, as public policy expert Robert Reich notes, comes at a particularly
inopportune juncture in history:

As companies drop health insurance and pension coverage for example, public
provision of them becomes more important. As jobs and incomes grow less secure,
public safety nets become more essential. As companies are pressured to show
profits, tougher measures are needed to guard public health, safety, the environ-
ment, and human rights against the possibility that executives may feel compelled
to cut corners. 5

The larger environmental and social consequences of this growth of global capital-
ism can be seen in myriad ways. While our per capita GDP has increased three-fold
since the 1950s, that growth has occurred alongside unprecedented waste and con-
sumption. Americans comprise 5 percent of the global population but consume 25
percent of the world’s oil and coal, 80 to 90 percent of which is wasted through in-
efficiencies in delivery systems and poor design. We spend ten kilocalories of hydro-
carbons to produce one kilocalorie of food. We have 30 percent of the world’s supply
of automobiles that contribute over 50 percent of the world’s carbon emissions from
transportation. The average American disposes of one million pounds of waste each
year. We have 172 deep well injection sites strewn across the country storing our haz-
ardous waste. We have lost more than 50 percent of the country’s wetlands since
European settlement, lose more than one million acres each year to urban sprawl,
roads and parking lots, and now have less than 2 percent of land mass in the conti-