Nathan Scandella (personal)

Small Minded

I was watching a show on NOVA the other day about green technologies. One story struck me as very wrong. The documentary was talking with small businesses, about some of the changes needed to become more energy efficient. Basically, a small business owner said that if an investment in energy efficiency couldn't pay for itself within two or three years, they couldn't do it. Really?

Now, we seem to have a love for small businesses in this country. Bush loved to talk about them, because in appearing to fight for the small business, it made him seem like less of a corporate puppet. Never mind that small businesses are generally owned by fairly wealthy people. Liberals love to support the small, local businesses because they think big corporations are inherently evil, and they just sit around in their corporation buildings, and they're all "corporation-y", and they make money. Make it's just about being the underdog. Nevertheless, there seems to be a big reason here not to love small businesses.

If you've got the opportunity to spend some money up front, and then save money each year, to the point where you make your money back in 4 or 5 years, and then essentially make money from that point on, that's a no-brainer of a business decision. I'd love to have some investment opportunities where I knew I could make my money back, and then some. In my business, I just buy computers and office equipment, that depreciate the day I get them, and quickly wind up as obsolete paperweights. If small businesses are so strapped for cash that they can't do anything without almost immediate payback, then they are a big part of this energy problem.

Poor people also are generally quite bad about investing in energy conserving technology. If you're renting, and might be somewhere else in 6 months, why replace a light bulb with the expensive CFL type, when you can buy the wasteful incandescent bulbs at a fraction of the price? That's the rationale. But, if everyone used CFL bulbs (at least in the fixtures that get left on for longer periods of time), we'd all reap energy savings that would easily pay for the higher-priced bulbs. It's a no-brainer. Unless, you're so poor that everything has to be about the very cheapest thing in the short run. Which is exactly how we got into this problem, using cheap energy sources like coal and oil.

The Walmarts of the world have started retrofitting buildings with energy saving technology. Why not? They get good PR, and they'll clearly save money over the long-term, too. You see, Walmart knows they'll be around in 5 years, so there's no need to focus all decisions on the very near term. If small businesses can't do this, then maybe we need fewer small businesses. And this isn't even just about energy. There's a whole range of other bad decisions that get made when you're only accounting for near term impacts.

Conserving energy, and using cleaner technologies, will undoubtedly be the most important issue for the rest of my lifetime. It's certainly far more important than some campy fascination with the little fish swimming in the big pond of capitalism. If small fish can't see but a couple inches in front of their faces, then they deserve to be swallowed by the bigger fish who aren't so tragically nearsighted.

Posted at 08:30PM Feb 10, 2009 by Nathan in Environment  |  Comments[0]