Business Insight Zone

The GOAT blog at High Country News has a short item on the “pale green”-ness of most US voters. The upshot: even self-described environmentalists rank the environment behind other hot-button political issues like abortion and immigration.*

What does this have to do with the business world? Just a simple observation: from the wide range of environmentally-oriented stories I read, most consumers also qualify as “pale green” in their purchasing choices. If, for example, better environmental performance were more important to many consumers than price, Detroit’s Big Three auto makers could immediately upgrade the fuel efficiency of their fleets by using hybrid engines and the like. Yet these car companies (along with Nissan and others) have consistently determined that consumers aren’t willing to pay an extra few thousand for the same vehicle with a gas-electric hybrid instead of a standard gasoline engine. They could be wrong, or they could be exaggerating the costs of switching over, and at some point Ford or one of its close rivals may decide to bill itself as the “green” car company. (Somebody should take on the Toyota Prius, right?) But for today, these big companies have determined that it’s not in their economic interest to make a hard sell to consumers around environmental qualities. And consumers aren’t telling them otherwise with the “votes” they cast with their dollars (and euros, and pounds, and yen, . . . ).

For now, green-ness in consumerism is seen as a lifestyle choice — a “soft” consideration like product styling rather than a “hard” one like price. At some point, though, environmental shocks (flooding? drought?) could become severe enough that consumers — or regulators — impose changes on markets that go beyond matters of taste. That’s the likely point where consumers will go from “pale green” to “bright green.”

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* This issue is hardly new: In my academic life, I’ve been working on a research project about the elder President Bush’s environmental policies. Bush senior actually had a pretty strong record to draw upon, especially since he helped push through the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, a big bipartisan effort that was the most substantial piece of environmental legislation since the late 1970s. Yet by the time of the 1992 elections, Bush was swamped by kitchen-table issues (”It’s the economy, stupid”) far more than he ever could have been helped by a respectable environmental record.