Ethical Question
Business Impact On The Environment
Is Monetary Gain Beneficial For The Environment?
Introduction:
Many business minded people often times look for ways to monetize things that come
to thought or try to think of ways to take things such as objects, environments, or ideas,
and capitalize off of them. Furthermore, some corporations will go to the extremes
of legal limits infact some cases break the law in order to create profit.
The topic at hand is about money, and how it relates to the environment that we
live in which sometimes are affected by businesses that want to just to make a
buck without regard in some instances of the effects. Sometimes people may hear
in the news how certain companies may have a massive oil spill in the ocean or
gas leaks in cities, and those type of events affect our environment plus may
even affect our food systems to a degree in those cases affect our bodies. Many
times these companies that look to capitalize off of the environment to my knowledge
are seemingly energy related or mineral related companies that exploit the environment
in order to make a profit off of consumers that may not know the damaging effects
that it has on the environment.
Position Statement:
My position is that in life there are many ways that things can be done either
beneficial having positive impact in other areas or non-beneficial to where the
risk to reward ratio is high causing damage to other areas. I take the stance
of using my operational risk management in any case I position myself to say
I choose to do things that are beneficial, and have a positive impact in other areas.
For instance, instead of choosing nuclear energy that can have very harmful effects
such as the "Fukushima" I rather use clean energy such as solar panels, windmills,
or even using large bodies of water to generate energy more safely. I noticed
various companies may say they study the outcome of their involvement in using
the environment to make monetary gain, but sometimes those studies comeback as
controversial which spark many debates formulating many types of opinions.
Supporting Reason:
Some of the clean energy, and eco friendly products support my views such as
solar energy and glass bottled water. I have been reading for sometime about the
global water crisis, and the damaged environment has polluted much of the earth
fresh water according to my reading so to switch into more of clean energy plus
in addition to using eco or biodegradable products will help eliminate some of
the pollution on the planet. In a article by "Energy Informative" according to
Mathias Aarre Maehlum,"U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory found that the sales price of the average home increased $17,000
with solar panels". To me not only clean energy is beneficial to the environment,
but also to can be just as economically beneficial.
Opposing Reason:
Some opposers to clean energy, and products have stated in some arguments is that
many industries would cause an economic collapse if we were to switch to clean energy
without a phasing in process. Additionally, many big corporations have a lot invested
in their current business practices that could be damaging to the economy, and to
job creation. Furthermore, to make a sudden jump to clean energy would cause a depression.
According to Robert L. Bradley Jr,"Even improved new generation renewable capacity is, on
average, twice as expensive as new capacity from the most economical fossil-fuel
alternative and triple the cost of surplus electricity". So consequently even
though there is technology for clean energy the argument remains is the cost of
converting to clean energy is fairly expensive.
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