A panel of the National Research Council is urging the federal government to resume development of a “green” accounting system that would calculate, in addition to standard economic measurements, the costs of such things as resource depletion and environmental and health damage from pollution. The Commerce Department had been working on just such a system, called the “Green GDP” project, until 1994 when a skeptical Congress stopped its efforts. The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is now calling for that project to be restarted.
