The Washington Post reported recently on a new study that finds the return on political corruption – lobbying, to use the airbrushed word – can yield as much as a 22,000 percent rate of return on the investment of companies who are successful. The newspaper makes this crucial point: “The study by researchers at the University of Kansas underscores the central reason that lobbying has become a $3 billion-a-year industry in Washington: It pays.”

The researchers calculated an average rate of return of 22,000 percent for those companies that helped lobby for the tax break. Eli Lilly, for example, reported in disclosure documents that it spent $8.5 million in 2003 and 2004 to lobby for the provision — and eventually gained tax savings of more than $2 billion.

The tax break in question was included as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, and was billed as a way to create jobs in the United States by requiring companies to use the money for specific purposes.

But the Congressional Research Service and others have since found that many companies cut jobs in the wake of the tax break and that nearly all the money was used for stock buybacks or dividends.

I have long wondered about the economic cost of corruption. I had always guessed the formula would go like this: buy a politician for $3 million, and reap a return of $300 million, by creating an unnecessary process that costs the commonwealth $3 billion. I always thought that it would be much more efficient to pay the politician $5 million, in return for rigorous transparency and scrutiny, and make corruption an offense very close to treason: after all, sovereign money is at stake.

Transforming the current global economy into one that is completely sustainable will involve more than simply replacing today’s capital projects with new green initiatives. We also have to look at politics, and use new policy mechanisms to put an end to the practice known today as “lobbying”, best understood by its old-fashioned name of “corruption.”

A sustainable economy is one in which all business models rigorously internalize all costs into themselves. This is the opposite of the way capitalism and industrialism have developed, where the object is to externalize the greatest number of costs onto others, often unwitting stakeholders. So for example, a fleet of trucks that isn’t taxed enough to repair the roads it wears down illustrates a business model that has externalized part of its true cost.

And the clash with public policy is inevitable, since most business operations depend to some extent on the public infrastructure. Externalizing true costs increasingly requires political assistance – and those unwitting stakeholders tend to be the taxpayers and the politically powerless – as physical resources become less freely available, and because frequently the true costs of business operations involve wear on the public infrastructure, or damage to the planetary ecosystem itself.

Sustainability therefore demands a true accounting of costs, and this has to mean the end of corruption in politics. A turbulent planet suffering from total system collapse throws a high-stakes chip onto the table, against which the old ways of bribery and corruption will have to fight a desperate rearguard action. What will remain after the battle is done, none can say.