Trade-offs, the reality we like to hide

I hate the term “win-win.” It implies that some decisions have no down-side. But I have never found a true win-win proposition. There are only degrees of win that are always offset by degrees of loss. But the moniker persists especially when:

• there are multiple stakeholders-with-voice who each find a solution where they gain more than they give, or
• there are stakeholders-without-voice who give more than they gain, but since they have no voice, the perception remains that everybody who matters wins… until problems grow to a point that the impacted stakeholders begin to be heard.

Many historical environmental problems resulted from trade-offs where a constituency was not heard from until it could not be ignored.

Take CFC’s and their impact on the ozone layer. Well before CFC’s were invented, we used highly flammable and at times explosive petroleum products as solvents and heat-exchange fluids… and as a result many people died and many facilities were destroyed because of accidents they caused. It sure seemed like a win-win proposition when non-flammable chlorinated solvents were introduced as their replacement. Fires were reduced and with it acute risks to workers and buildings. But the trade-off was that these materials posed chronic risks to anybody exposed to them, risks like cancer that would not be realized for years. Furthermore, these chlorinated chemicals were not as stable as first thought, and as they degraded into a putrid acid, they began to attack the metals they were used to clean or they were stored in. Finally when they needed to be disposed, they could not be burned and had no further economic value, so much of it ended up in the ground contaminating soils and well water alike. Rather than win-win, the rise of chlorinated solvents resulted from a “win now”-”lose-later” reality.

Finally along came the chemically stable chloro-fluorocarbon. It was so stable that acidic degradation in any human-compatible environment would not be a problem, and the health risks from exposure also seemed less (it could induce heartbeat irregularities at high inhalation concentrations, but there appeared to be lower cancer risk). Finally it was so volatile and insoluble that when it was deemed waste, it would just float away into the air and not hang around contaminating the land. The manufacturers thought they had a chemical that everybody could live with.

But what is an advantage in one arena can be a problem elsewhere. CFC’s are so stable that once they escape to the atmosphere, they persist for years eventually migrating to its edge in space where it finds an extreme environment with enough oxidation potential to destroy it, but at the expense of consuming the ozone that previously reduced levels of ultraviolet radiation from reaching the planet’s surface. Now instead of “win now”-”lose later” we had a case of “win now”-”make everybody else lose later.” Instead of localised losers, CFC’s were unexpectedly putting all of the planet’s life at risk.

The outrage that ensued gave voice to parties that previously had none in decisions over how to clean and cool our local environments. As a result CFC use today is more restricted. What it took was the realization of unintended, delayed and expanded consequences to make the original win-winners change their behaviors.

The belief that today’s green movement is creating win-win for all is also a fallacy. While investment in green energy and to create energy and water efficient buildings is being pushed, unintended consequences are coming to light. At this point it is the powerless and the worker who are being asked to take on risks so that the owners can receive the glory. Recent stories in the New York Times have highlighted how the rural Chinese environment is being degraded so that the powerful can profit from excavation of rare earth metals that are critical components of the batteries slated to replace our internal combustion engines. Even in the US workers suffer. Take the new City Center in Las Vegas. It proudly displays several LEED certificates certifying it was designed with the environment in mind, and its operators appear honest in their attempts to reduce the Las Vegas environmental footprint (how much water and energy it consumes per capita). But 6 construction workers lost their lives during its construction, a loss that labor advocates claim was partially due to an overly-aggressive construction schedule and the use of new environmentally-good designs that have yet to take into account safety components making both construction and maintenance easier. Because LEED certification covers almost exclusively energy and water efficiencies, one can make a case that the market value of such certification devalues the workers who make it possible!

Giving all stakeholders veto-power before somebody can act is a recipe for maintaining the status quo; that seems to be the path that the US Senate has found itself on. But giving voice (as opposed to veto-power) to all stakeholders is what sustainability should be all about. That voice can lead to better solutions and better implementation. If we don’t, today’s sustainability professionals may be judged by history just as harshly as the creators of CFC’s, people who gave us a product that had benefits, but by initially ignoring stakeholders that had little voice, benefits that eventually seemed trite.