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The public has an important role to play in the energy debate. First, by learning about all the alternatives, then by demanding that elected officials keep the public policy eye on the prize.
In the energy bill passed by the U.S. congress in December, 2007, there is a $24 billion subsidy for new nuclear power construction. This is a boondoggle of the first order, Nuclear power is still radioactive, still prohibitively toxic, still far too expensive, and still highly vulnerable to accident or terrorism in ways that wind and solar never will be. As if that is not enough, based on current demand, world reserves of uranium fuel will last only about another 25 years. Nuclear power remains on the table only because of the industry’s deep pockets and substantile political influence. It cannot compete economically or environmentally on an unbiased playing field with the many clean, renewable energy technologies that are now emerging. If the cost/benefit analysis is applied transparently and without bias across the board, nuclear power will simply not pencil out.
The way forward is clear. We must end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels now. We must put the brakes on the pollution of our atmosphere with greenhouse gases now. The way forward is with energy harvested from the Sun, the wind, and from other clean, renewable sources of energy.
Challenge#4 - We Must Evolve to a More Natural Form of Capitalism
Market economics in present form have been around since the latter part of the 17th century. The relentless economic expansion that came with the industrial revolution facilitated the emergence of large corporations and business cartels. They took over banking and investment, industrial production, and the transport and distribution of massive quantities of raw materials and finished goods. From the beginning, money, a.k.a. capital, ruled the day. Little of the unprecedented wealth generated by this economic juggernaut trickled down to average laborers. The system was structured to maximize profit above all else.
When market based economics began, resources were treated as though they were inexhaustible and had no intrinsic value. The only thing accounted for was the cost of extraction and processing. Little has changed over the years. The big difference is that now it is being done on a planetary-wide scale. Industry continues to shamelessly exploit the Earth’s resources and dump its wastes on the ground, in rivers and waterways, and in the atmosphere. In the current bookkeeping vernacular, those costs are considered external, with the bill largely left for the public to pay.
Labor has also always been treated as an expense that should be minimized. These days, that translates to ever more jobs migrating from the world’s developed nations to those places where labor costs are cheap and worker rights minimal.
This mostly unregulated and unrestrained way of doing business no longer works. The consequent levels of soil depletion, air pollution, habitat destruction, deforestation, and such might have been tolerable when there were only a million humans on the planet. It is clearly not acceptable with the population at 6.7 billion and still growing.
What the world needs now is a global market economy that assigns proper value to increasingly scarce natural resources, fosters environmental stewardship, and rewards labor with reasonable, living wages. In this new brand of natural capitalism, the tax burden will be shifted away from labor and income toward taxation of negative behaviors like resource exploitation, pollution, and waste.
David Korten, author of The Turning Point; From Empire to Earth Community, states that “The central problem of global capitalism may be described in terms of institutional relationships that concentrate the power of ownership in the hands of an economic aristocracy that is delinked from community interests and has no accountability…Equity doesn’t mean mandating that everyone must receive the same income. It does mean giving high priority to assuring everyone a means of livelihood adequate to human dignity and to avoiding extremes of wealth and poverty.”
We must reinvent our economic system to make it more equitable and reflective of the common good. Riane Eisler, in her splendid book, The Real Wealth of Nations, sums up the challenge, “Financial profits should not be the be-all and end-all of business and economic policy. The welfare of the people and the health of the planet must be overriding goals of sound business and economic policies.”
Challenge #5 – We Must Reform Our Political Systems to Assure They Are Democratic, Inclusive, and Impervious to Corruption
Politics in America is awash in money. It is a sad fact. Money talks, and politicians listen.
In January of 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Buckley vs. Valeo ruling. This is the infamous case in which the court declared that money equals free speech and is protected as such under the law. The effect of this ruling was to unleash a massive and highly corrosive flow of influence money into the campaign coffers of elected politicians on the local, state, and national levels. It left the speech of the average citizen virtually without value compared to that of wealthy corporations and individuals who are able to trade off vast quantities of money for influence. This undue political power is further enhanced in the U.S. by the fact that legal precedent treats corporations as persons under the law. Every other country in the world still considers a corporation an artificial legal construct, chartered to serve the interests of the public good.
The political power of corporations has expanded dramatically in recent years, in no small part because government regulators have removed restrictions on media ownership. Virtually all of the major television, radio, and print media outlets in the U.S. have been consolidated under the control of a handful of major corporations. Instead of honest, unbiased journalism, the media offers the public a filtered version of reality obscured by a near constant, inane drone of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, ‘American Idol’, and the like.
‘He who has the money and power makes the rules’ has been the unspoken, overarching mantra since the earliest days of modern commerce. There is no mystery about where this has taken us. The time has come to put things right.
