Like Paper Like Oil in Environmental Preservation

Rivanda Royono

Jakarta

People tend to see a problem from only one point of view their own. This is especially true when a particular problem hurts them badly. When the price of paper increased a few weeks ago, Indonesians lamented left and right how it would harm their lives.

Working and studying would be impended, books would be unaffordable and basically generations of undereducated people would be denied their right to read and write.

Now we have something new to bemoan: the oil price. If an increased price of paper would lead to a tragedy of an illiterate nation, surely an increased price of oil – the source of all our energy – would lead to utter catastrophe. Oil-triggered inflation would choke us to death. Household expenses would double, children would go hungry, industries would close down and the entire economy would crumble.

Everyone should take a deep breath and calm down. Let us try to see these issues from another point of view.

On everage, using a very conservative estimate, a person in Indonesia would use approximately 100 kilograms of paper in a year. While it is difficult to get a precise number, one tree can produce around 1 ton of paper. So from use of paper alone, an average person would have to chop down a tenth of a tree every year.

There perhaps 150 million people in Indonesia that use paper regularly. So at the present paper consumption rate, we're cutting down 15 million trees annually. Only for paper!

Now here's the rub: We can in fact significantly decrease the number of trees we chop down for paper by reusing and recycling paper. The problem with Indonesians is we have never had the incentive to do that. We never bother to print or copy on both sides of paper, we never bother to collect our papers and recycle them.

Professors in respectable universities reprimand students who submit their essays that are printed on used paper.

Paper is more than simply sheets of cellulose; it is a product that incurs significant environmental costs. The more paper we use, the more trees we chop down, the less water retention our soil has, the more carbon we release into the air, the warmer our planet gets. And that last one translates to floods, failed crops and tropical disease outbreaks, just to name a few.

These costs are not reflected in the price we pay for paper. Economists have a term for this phenomenon: negative externalities. To us, paper is cheap. And when a product is cheap, we tend to use it beyond our absolute needs. But someone will be we and our children in the next 20 years or so.

The negative externalities of fossil fuels are even more extreme. Every time we use oil-fueled transportation or electricity, we inject loads of carbon along with other hazardous chemicals into the atmosphere. We warm up the planet and infuse toxins into its atmosphere. Those costs are never taken into account. We pay much less for oil than we're supposed to.

But there is something even direr in our oil consumption at the present: We tend to forget that we need to save some for our children.

Indonesia's – and the world's – oil reserves are seriously depleting. At our current consumption rate, an optimistic estimate places Indonesia's oil reserve at a mere 20 years. Global oil production will peak in a mere four years, followed by a steep decline lasting around 30-40 years.

That means that a child born this year as an Indonesian will have to be a billionaire by the time she turns 20 years old if she wants to use electricity or a motor vehicle because by that time nothing will be more expensive than oil – if there is any left for Indonesians.

Indonesians' indulgence in oil is off the chart because not only have we never taken into account the environmental cost of oil, the government has been making oil even cheaper by throwing in subsidies. Hence for decades, there has been no more incentive for Indonesian cities to design good public transit systems; no incentive for individuals to use available public transportation; no incentive for the electricity utility to search for alternative energy; no incentive for industries to make energy use more efficient. Instead, individuals opt to have personal cars because petrol is cheap, while households crank up their AC because electricity is cheap.

So while things are looking pretty gloomy today – and nobody is denying the huge cost of increasing the domestic oil price – we need to understand that most of us have been chanting the wrong demands for the last few months.

Bringing back down the price of paper and maintaining subsidies for oil is not the right thing to do. We may think we're protecting the Indonesian people's interest, but we're actually doing the exact opposite.

Those demands, if met, may works to our benefit bust most definitely to our children's disadvantage. Cheap paper and oil will eliminate any incentive for us to do the right thing. That is simply not acceptable. We need to change our demands and, while we're at it, our behavior.

We should not demand cheaper paper. We should demand the government provide incentives – tax breaks, for instance – for paper producers to recycle paper. We should demand school teachers and university professors to encourage – not deter – their students to print their assignment on used paper. And we should think twice before printing and copying any document we have.

We should not demand the government maintain fuel subsidies. We should demand the government provide better public transportation and pedestrian facilities. We should demand the national electric utility continue and expedite its research on viable alternative energy for Indonesia. And we should stop circumventing the law and stocking up subsidized fuels in our garages.

It is time to stop being selfish. We need to stop seeing problems from only one point of view. We need to stop focusing on our generation's interest alone. And we most certainly need to stop paying only a fraction of the bill and letting our children bear the bulk of the cost.

Rivanda Royono is the executive director of the Association for Critical Thinking and a student of the University of Indonesia's planning and public policy graduate program.

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