Until carbon-neutral economic activity is a reality, we must drastically curtail consumption to achieve a carbon-neutral CO2 contribution within 4 years to keep CO2 from "business as usual" forcing at 1000 ppm of CO2 and 25°F temperature rise and catastrophic 250 foot sea-level rise making an ice-free planet inhabitable by 2100. (Dr. James Hansen)
There is a 1:1 relationship between 3% yearly economic growth and the 3% annual growth in [tonnage of] carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Fast and exorbitant profiteering predicated on exponential, never-ending economic growth from emitting exorbitant levels of global greenhouse gases are killing the carry-capacity required for the human species on the magnitudes of billions, let alone the fatal overshoot of the consumption demands of 9.2 billion humans, based a growth-oriented economy forecast for 2050.
California's size (if considered a nation) makes it the world's eighth-largest economy and twelfth-ranked contributor to global greenhouse gases. Linking economic policy to ecological policy here, will set a standard around the world.
As a mechanism of governance, tax policy is tied to Budgetary crisis in California. Present tax policy was structured from being bereft of the State's rightful non-militarized Federal share, the bursting of social, political, financial, technological, housing, construction bubbles which decimated the California tax-base - all based on an obsolete, failed, consumption-fueled, corporate-greed driven unsustainable economic structure, systemically and inextricably tied to ever-escalating climate change from unchecked and unmitigated increases of high-entropy waste such as carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas), mine slag and dirty water - from consuming low-entropy natural resources such as trees, fish and coal - produced by a problematic economic engine capable of only yielding polar glacial melt, desertification, lowered snow melt, drought, extreme weather and wildfires, dying forests, rising ocean levels, extinction of coral reefs, ocean acidification, growing ocean dead zones, plant and animal extinction, and human settlement dislocation, in turn relentlessly ratcheting up temperatures, looming water shortages in California from the 500-year drought plagued shriveling-up Colorado River and over-stressed ecological services throughout California. Tax policy to date, based on revenue, represents the "business-as-usual" endless quantification of the destruction of ecological services as a failed definition of wealth.
As if an afterthought, the growth economy is responsible for producing energy and for producing the large amount of goods, only some of which are essential and useful.
The objective is to keep consumption and spending under control. Taxation is integral to the task of governance meet the public need and provide for the common good. Tax policy can help redirect overconsumption to reward renewable, carbon-neutral technologies, doing more with less, restoration of ecological services. Its a case of Orwellian Doublethink to believe the present growth economy framework in which tax policy is formulated around the notions of progressivity and tax brackets is up to the task of meeting the public need to survive and be sustaining. Taxation can be considered to be a wealth redistribution scheme enabled by governance.
Taxation cannot remain focused on a system of non-productive growth where tremendous costs (deforestation, contaminated water tables, depleted ocean fisheries, ocean dead zones) are held "off the books." The true costs of "doing business" has to be accounted for and subtracted from the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Taxation has to be applied to fossil fuel energy sources and sunseted via taxes on carbon while renewable energy frameworks are incentivized. Not only the yearly 3% growth in global greenhouse gas has to be cut, but the overall yearly decrease has to approach 12% per year, a level that the Obama administration has claimed is not possible. The alternative (to allow greater than a 2 degree C temperature increase - with less than a 70% reduction in emissions by 2015) is not only 'not possible', its unthinkable. Transitioning to a steady steady economy is an imperative to accomplish the levels of these emission reductions.
The current regressive tax policy must be changed as part of the initiatives to transition to a renewable energy, livable wage, green jobs economy and to steer away from unregulated financial environments. Inflationary spiral on lower income workforce can be reduced by a phased elimination of state tax on wages and salary and sales tax compensated with a graduated tax rate on gross rents, gross business receipts and resource-based carbon taxes. Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker has suggested a similar scheme and put it to the Obama administration. Resorting to a split roll assessment by redefining what constitutes a 'sale' of non-residential property for the purpose of flagging the property to be reassessed by the County Assessor and requiring a mark-to-market for non-residential properties every ten years if no sale was made in the interim.
Unsustainable speculative urban sprawl, mansionification can be curbed through tax incentives by replacing tax on building improvements with tax on land. By doing so, transit-oriented, pedestrian friendly, mixed-use development, generating on-site renewable power and certified renewable energy credits is encouraged. The overall objective is to 'get off the grid' by achieving net-zero-energy performance.
Tax policy can be changed to close developer loopholes to increase public coffers. Single payer universal healthcare will save 30% over the current privatized structure. By removing the developer and corporate lobbyist influence over land-use planning decisions, neighborhood stakeholders and interests are represented. Taxation occurs with representation.
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True cost of fossil fuel based industries profiteering from war and oil consumption currently is "off the books" by adherence to the present greed-based growth economy that does not account for ecological service loss.
Treating ecological services as commodity to be endlessly consumed is considered a growth economy. A steady state economy tax policy must reward innovation, doing more with less, tax carbon, sunset fossil fuel dependency, reward reuse, repair, recycling, renovation, restoration and revitalization.
An urgent and immediate need exists to become a carbon-neutral economy.
“Even so, the most terrifying prospect of a world warmed by 4 °C is that it may be impossible to return to anything resembling today’s varied and abundant Earth. Worse still, most models agree that once there is a 4 °C rise, the juggernaut of warming will be unstoppable, and humanity’s fate more uncertain than ever.
“The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.
Four degrees may not sound like much - after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. “It can be considered the Anthropocene,” says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
