ACCOUNTABILITY

Bainbridge presents an argument for a new approach to accounting and sustainability in this nonfiction work.

The author argues that fighting climate change requires acknowledging the true cost of products, practices, and decisions beyond their literal dollar value and ensuring that this full cost is borne by those responsible for it. The book advocates a revamped system of accounting that includes external costs, assigns a monetary value to indirect costs, and factors in the full value of natural resources and intangible inputs. While the focus is primarily on environmental implications, Bainbridge’s system also incorporates working conditions, health care, and community impact. After a comprehensive overview, subsequent chapters explain how the system applies to specific industries like agriculture, construction, and energy. The book provides examples of cases in which governments have successfully imposed financial penalties for destructive actions, such as fees charged for pesticide and fertilizer use in Scandinavia. It also details the elements of a true cost report, used to assess and convey the all-inclusive cost of an activity (the author provides guidance on how to create one). Bainbridge is an extremely knowledgeable author, and although the text can appear dense, he is skilled at crafting coherent explanations of complex topics and turning piles of data into a narrative. The book does an excellent job of providing specific examples of true costs, including a multipage enumeration of the differences between a conventional fast-food restaurant burger and a bison burger that demonstrates how their costs go beyond the price listed on the menu. There are occasional moments of clever phrasing (“A few years from now, when people ask what happened to Arizona’s water, the answer will be, ‘the Saudi cows ate it’ ”), but overall the prose is simple, clear, and unaffected. Although the book deals primarily with large structural issues—Bainbridge does not pretend that it will be easy to adopt a new system of accounting—it also offers actionable tips for readers looking to reduce their own true costs on a small, manageable scale.

An informative and thought-provoking framework for reckoning with total costs.