It is the stocks of greenhouse gas emissions accumulated in the atmosphere that are causing global warming. This stock is itself caused by stocks, including all petrol and diesel cars in use, the overall area of drained, oxidizing peatland (the stocks of carbon they had stored and have been progressively releasing), the stock of coal-fired power plants. The stock of freshwater melting and entering the Atlantic as a result of global warming is slowing down Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, threatening a major upset in climate patterns that could devastate rainfed agriculture in Europe. The stocks of carbon dioxide accumulated in the oceans are causing ocean acidification, upsetting marine food chains and threatening food security. The stocks of plastics accumulated in the environment are causing ever larger disruptions of ecosystems, threatening food security. The stocks of all compacted agricultural soils, too degraded to absorb nutrients and water, is a direct threat to global food security.
While stocks are at the heart of the polycrisis, regulation is predominantly focused on flows, not stocks.
Most regulations have typically regulated the quality of what flows (services, goods, jobs, vehicles, etc.), but not the overall volumes flowing at any point in time, nor their accumulation (both used and wasted) over time. Regulations seeking to protect the public or the environment from the harmful effects of goods, substances or technologies have approached them as individual items. New chemicals have been regulated one by one, as they entered or sought entry into a market. Emission limits have been set and monitored per industrial plant or farm. Products have been the unit to which safety standards and recyclability targets apply.
This focus on flows means that regulation has been systemically blind to the stock of goods and services that do damage. The impacts of stocks - cumulated chemicals, emissions, goods, machines - have been ignored. This is both an act of gross simplification and hubris.
It is an act of gross simplification to tackle pollution problems by regulating individual products, ignoring that they accumulate. This simplification enables the said products to flow as easily and rapidly as possible across geographies and markets. But it does nothing to address the problems caused by their accumulation. In colourful language, Timothy Morton questions the benefit of all that: “why is it better to stir the shit around inside the toilet bowl faster and faster rather than just leaving it there?”
It is hubris to pretend one can keep harm within a tolerable range - as much sector and product regulation is designed to - by regulating flows of an ever-growing diversity of goods, substances and technologies. Past a threshold of volumes and complexity, it becomes impossible.
Industrial chemicals in food, plastics, and plant protection products are a telling example. They have been regulated by some of the most complex regulatory regimes in existence bar pharmaceuticals. After decades of operating, those regimes face a reckoning, however. Synthetic chemicals are now inescapable and ubiquitous: forever chemicals and microplastics have been found in everyone’s body (even in placenta and breast milk) and every ecosystem, where they continue to accumulate. Exposure to synthetic substances is widely considered a direct contributor to poor health and biodiversity declines worldwide.
Chakrabarty has summed up this paradox, whereby regulation deemed to protect has contributed to making things worse: “the institutions humans have used so far to secure human life have reached a point of expansion and development whereby that very fundamental premise of human politics - securing human life - is undermined”.
Regulation over-simplified the challenges posed by the substances it was tasked to assess, and particularly the matter of their interactions, combinations into “cocktails”, and accumulation in the natural environment. The sheer number of chemicals on the market is enormous: around 350,000 chemicals and chemical mixtures have been registered worldwide. New ones are brought into the market all the time. Their combined risks to the Earth system can no longer be assessed, leading scientists in 2022 to pronounce the planetary boundary of novel entities breached.
Can it be fixed? Regulation (and any science, technology, resources and market forces it may build upon or steer) is largely powerless to reduce the stocks of chemicals, microplastics, or emissions that have already accumulated in the environment. We have neither the technologies nor the resources to do so. For example, it has been estimated that “current costs to remove and destroy the total PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, frequently known as “forever chemicals”] mass released annually into the environment would likely exceed the global GDP of 106 trillion USD”. Capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reversing ocean acidification through ocean alkalinity enhancement are not feasible at scale either. Pending revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, only natural biochemical processes may “regulate” these stocks, at their own speed, which is completely unrelated to human needs. We know of no natural processes capable of returning synthetic polymers to their primary elements. It is telling that leading experts have begun looking at plastics as “carbon sinks” that should be stored until a solution to their reprocessing may been found.
What regulation can do, however, is to reduce the speed at which stocks are growing: stocks of buildings, plastics, packaging, chemicals, cars, etc. By taking the question of stocks seriously, regulation can contribute to “reduc[ing] transgression of the planetary boundaries”. That may not sound like a lot. But in a world where it is no longer possible to bring us back within planetary boundaries, the next best thing is to reduce the extent to which we overshoot those boundaries. This will limit the range and scale of harms humanity will have to deal with. This is the meaning of the sentence “every fraction of a degree of warming matters” that many climate scientists have uttered year after year.
Regulation does very occasionally target stocks. The regulation of chlorofluorocarbons meant to address their accumulation in the atmosphere and their impacts on the ozone layer. The same can be said of historical regulation aimed at mercury, lead or DDT. Much more recent examples include regulation meant to stop the sale of diesel and petrol cars and fossil fuel boilers in Europe. These are exceptions, however. Regulation at its core has been focused on flows, not stocks. It will need to change its focus if it is to have a meaningful impact on managing and mitigating the polycrisis.