In our brainstorming sessions, one tantalizing idea kept popping up: If you dig deep into the innards of the capitalist algorithm, you discover a glaring flaw. It’s that the vast majority of humankind’s carbon emissions are unpriced. We buy a car for $35,000, then drive it around for ten years creating thousand dollars’ worth of global warming. Who pays for that damage? Do future generations have to clean up our mess? The illogic extends from the gas we pump into our cars to the smart phones we carry in our pockets to the Big Macs we wolf down at McDonald’s. Out of the billions and billions of transactions made every day in our global marketplace, only a tiny fraction reflect their true cost. And each one drives us a little closer to global system collapse. With every bogus transaction, another drop of meltwater slides off an iceberg, another puff of CO2 rises to the sky, another bubble of methane wafts up from the tundra. If we keep repeating that mistake, billions of times a day, week after week, month after month, year after year, what do you think will happen?

To date, only a handful of economists have bothered to think about the true cost of what we buy and do. They speak the language of efficiency and have taught the whole world to do the same. So why are so many of our leading economists silent, then, on these, the greatest inefficiencies of all? Why are our markets not telling the truth? Why are we selling off our natural capital and calling it income? Why is the profession of economics committing such a monumental system error?

Let’s figure this out. What is the real cost of shipping a container load of toys from Chongqing to Los Angeles? Or a case of apples grown in New Zealand to markets in North America? And what is the true cost of that fridge humming 24/7 in your kitchen . . . that steak sizzling on your grill . . . that car sitting in your garage? What are the by-products of our way of living actually costing us? Grab a calculator and let’s get at this. Instead of watching economists pontificate endlessly about interest rates, stock-market swings and GDP growth, let’s put them to productive big-picture use crunching the real cost of things.

We start with the little stuff: plastic bags, coffee cups, paper napkins. Economists sleuth out the eco-costs — say it’s five cents per plastic bag, ten cents per cup and a fraction of a cent per paper napkin — and those we tack on. We’re already doing that with the various eco-fees and eco-taxes included in the price of tires, cans of paint and other products. But now, spurred on by the ever worsening climate crisis, we abandon the concept of ancillary fees and taxes and start implementing true-cost pricing right across the board.

TRUE COST PLASTIC

After raiding nature’s warehouse of wood and stone and metal, we turned, in the early 20th century, to plastics. Here was something cheap and strong to build a space-age world.

Now that miracle invention is choking our landfills, polluting our rivers and oceans and poisoning our bodies and food chains. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts plastic use will nearly triple by 2060. Canada and the European Union have banned single-use items and some activists and scientists are advocating capping and reducing plastic production and use But it’s obvious that none of this will be nearly enough to fix the problem

Here’s a strategy that will.

Economists do the research and come up with their best estimate of the environmental and health price we pay — say it’s $500 per ton. Every manufacturer, corporation and retailer that uses plastic in their business will then be required to account for that. Maybe it’s a surcharge of 25 cents on every bottle of Coke. If Coca Cola can’t take a hit like that on their margin, they’ll have to change their business model. Likewise, the automobile industry will have to redesign their cars. Food producers and supermarkets will have to adapt. Every business that uses plastic will have to adjust their business model.

The cost of living will go up, and that’ll hurt. But plastic packaging will gradually disappear from our lives. We’ll buy our groceries in paper, cardboard and glass containers. We’ll wash our plates, knives and forks and use them year after year, some for a lifetime. The garbage gyres in the oceans will shrink and finally disappear. Microplastics will stop plugging the tissues of every mammal including us. And the nightmare of bringing up our children in a world awash in plastic will slowly fade away.

TRUE COST DRIVING

Once we add on the environmental cost of carbon emissions, the cost of building and maintaining roads, the medical costs of accidents, the noise and the aesthetic degradation of urban sprawl, your gasoline powered automobile will cost you around $100,000, and a tank of gas $350. You’ll still be free to drive all you want, but instead of passing the costs on to future generations, you’ll pay up front.

Plenty of people will dismiss the concept as unrealistic and dangerous. There will be howls of protest. Traditional lefties will point out how true cost would create a two-tier regime in which the ultrarich can afford to emit as much frivolous CO2 as they like, while for the bulk of humanity everyday life will be more miserable than ever. Politicians will dismiss it as electoral suicide. Industries will lobby vehemently against it — at least in the beginning. But as the planet heats, and all the other strategies have failed, true cost may turn out to be the only way left to avoid total climate catastrophe. And once it kicks in, we’ll see a fundamental transformation in how we get around on our planet.

Car use will plunge. Ride sharing and bicycling will spike. People will live closer to work. Demand for monorails, bullet trains, subways and streetcars will surge. A paradigm shift in urban planning will calm the pace of city life. Cities will be built for people, not cars. Our skies will be clearer. Breathing easier. Minds calmer. The specter of the climate emergency will no longer preoccupy our every waking moment.

TRUE COST EATING

We estimate and add in the hidden costs of our industrial farming and food processing systems. That chicken that was never allowed to spread its wings and walk outside will cost you $50. The price of imported groceries will include the true cost of shipping them long distances. An avocado from Mexico will cost you $25. You won’t be able to indulge so often. And that shrimp from Indonesia? Once the eco-devastation of mega farming and container shipping are added on, it’ll run you two or three times what you’re paying now. A Big Mac will cost a lot more. So will most meats, produce and processed foods. You can still eat whatever you want, but you’ll have to pay the real price.

It will be tough at first, especially on lower-income families. But the cost of organic and locally produced food will fall and provide a good alternative. Local farmers will be celebrated. We’ll grow tomatoes on our verandas, eat at home more and maybe lose some weight and be a little healthier. Bit by bit, purchase by purchase, lifestyle change by lifestyle change, our diets and food systems will creep toward sustainability.

TRUE COST SHIPPING

For years it’s been ridiculously cheap to use mega tankers to ship container loads of stuff across oceans. Much of that will stop. Our current way of exporting and importing goods, the one economists have been touting as a way to spur growth, but which depends on a mightily subsidized ocean transportation system, will no longer fly. The cost of all imported items at Walmart, Amazon and multinational megamarts will soar. The whole tenor of world trade will heave. Exports and imports will stabilize at a reduced level. Billions of purchases every day will come back to your neighborhood. Globalization — capitalism’s bred-in-the-bone burden — will cease to be the dominant economic paradigm. Modest fleets of cargo ships will go electric, or sail around the world on wind.

NEXT LEVEL ACCOUNTING: THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHIC COSTS

You’re cruising along an eight-lane highway and suddenly everything lurches to a halt. There’s a lot more going on here than a hefty blast of carbon wafting into the air. A traffic jam is a huge collective stress event. There are health costs to being pinned in your car, on a dammed river of steel, fingers tightening on the wheel, blood pressure rising. Mental health costs too. A recent Swedish study found that a daily commute of forty-five minutes increases your chance of divorce by 40 percent.

The psychic costs that our current system imposes on us are horrendous, and we’re just at the very early stage of realizing how devastating they really are.

What is the psychic cost of advertising, that daily broadside of pro- consumption messages that’s pickling your neurons? Or the mental toll of obsessively checking your phone — basically tugging on the leg-hold trap of Big Tech’s surveillance algorithms, over and over and over? Or the psychological damage of urgency, the punitive ticking clock that every link in the supply chain and every component of the gig economy runs on? Or the social solidarity cost of losing most of the indie shops in your neighborhood as Starbucks, Domino’s and Home Depot muscle their way in. Ask yourself, what’s happening to your soul when you’re walking like a zombie in a mall at Christmas with Silent Night playing in the background? All this is part of the True Cost story — and so must eventually be part of the accounting — of the epidemic of mood disorders, anxiety, loneliness and depression now sweeping the planet.

In a True Cost world, there’ll be no need for pleading and hectoring, no need to wallow in conflicting consumerist emotions. No one will be badgering you to eat less meat. No one will make you feel guilty about owning a car, or for going on that holiday to the Bahamas. None of that. All you’re being asked to do is become a consumer in a new kind of marketplace.

Instead of “lowest price wins and don’t ask too many questions,” market forces will align in surprising new ways. You will become part of a worldwide process in which every one of the billions of market transactions made every day are working for rather than against us.