from Unknown Earth: Why is Earth's climate so stable? * 24 September 2008 by Richard Lovett

The Venus Syndrome looms ahead with continuing the growth economy's "business as usual".

The changes we make to the climate by burning fossil fuels could last millions of years but, after we've gone, Earth's underlying thermostat should be able to regain control. That is not guaranteed, however. Both Venus and Mars were habitable once. Perhaps we should heed their warning and take better care of the thermostat our planet has so generously provided.
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Nature adds 5% more global greenhouse gases (ghg) yearly and all of that is absorbed in the carbon cycle. Mankind adds twenty times more than Nature and the excess ghg stays in the atmosphere and increases the temperature. Science tells us that humans are forcing the natural carbon cycle by 20 times the amount that nature assimilates its own carbon dioxide contribution (5% of man-made CO2). Economic activity will be 400% higher by mid-century with those in China and India consuming on the level of the US today. Yearly economic growth is pegged at 3%.
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Real wealth has no relationship with the non-productive gains realized from the financial bubble, now flattened. The global financial structure is not seen as returning anytime soon, according to George Soros and economist James K. Galbraith.

Real wealth - defined.

Real wealth is measured in a steady-state, sustainable economy based on zero carbon emissions, reset to a CO2 neutral flux, economic activity reset to much lower levels of consumption and a redefinition of the global economy into a constellation of revitalized, relocalized communities based on bio-regional determinism, watersheds, and local access to necessities of life, education, culture, health care for all.

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What we need to determine is how to peg the level of economic activity to a carbon-neutral, steady-state economy - in which there is a cessation of greenhouse gas forcing beyond nature's self-regulating level - an economic level supported at 5% of current greenhouse gas production.

To approach tax policy for a steady state economy, we need qualitative metrics of economic output and growth as a function of carbon-neutral systems outcomes.

Today's growth economy needs to transition to a carbon-neutral, net-zero, defined by buildings, mass transportation, lowered overall extent of private transport, manufacturing plants and dwellings are designed not only to generate all the energy they use (to be self-sustaining) but to be indefinitely recyclable for all its components, to the maximum extent possible. Growth will come from making process flow efficient and cease from the greed of gaming the market.

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.

"A steady state of carbon emissions has to be sustained at a level 70% lower than current levels to avoid the worst catastrophic effects of global warming. According to atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, “I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2015. We are currently putting in 3 per cent more each year.”

“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.

A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to “prepare for 4 °C of warming”.

A key factor in how well we deal with a warmer world is how much time we have to adapt. When, and if, we get this hot depends not only on how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere and how quickly, but how sensitive the world’s climate is to these gases. It also depends whether “tipping points” are reached, in which climate feedback mechanisms rapidly speed warming. According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 °C by 2100. Some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050.

If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.”

from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971.700-how-to-survive-the-coming-century.html

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To offset the specter of continuing the growth economy, a Green Ten key value, Community-based Economics, defines Sustainable Economics and Steady State Economics, as advanced by Herman Daly, a pioneer in ecological economics.

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(IV.) Sustainable Economics:

Community-centered, Steady State Economics is a more humanized, environmentally responsible economic alternative founded upon our 10 Key Values and the sub-disciplines of Steady State, Ecological and True Cost Economics.

Steady State Economics retains capitalism's internal flexibility, allowing for both class diversity and individual opportunities to acquire wealth, but it reframes assumptions about the viability of infinite growth and unlimited resources as well as such "inevitabilities" as cyclic recessions and unemployment.

Prioritizing the community, real people, and their environment, so that they are on par with traditional measures of productivity and consumption. Our integrative approach models natural ecological systems' success (noting that ecology actually derives from economics), not only ending wanton, environmental destruction and poverty, but balancing competitive and cooperative qualities with individual and collective elements of our society, so that all may flourish.

Diverging from both orthodox free market and planned economies, our policies are conservative insofar as they conserve limited resources, but progressive in implementing a future oriented society; they are antithetical to both Big Business and Big Government and irreducible to traditional left-right thinking. Our vision is a genuine third way that holistically combines the best features of other models with the practical diversity of our communities, worldly realities, and life's natural order, so that public sector and private enterprise, society and individual, all play interrelated, mutually supporting, and equally important roles in the larger political society, ecosphere, and eco(no)sphere.

Core Principles and the Measurement of Success:

There are several fundamental principles and guidelines that give our economic vision form, including:

1. Assessing economic activity with True Cost Pricing, incorporating its environmental and social effects alongside financial costs in a comprehensive Triple Bottom Line accounting, and similarly measuring our real economic, social, and environmental health alongside traditional markers like GNP and GDP with such indicators as:

i. Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare

ii. Infant Death Rates & Life Expectancy

iii. Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)

iv. Family Stability and Education Levels

v. Total Goods and Services (not just monetary)

vi. Disparity of Wealth Accumulation

2. Recognizing the Limits of Growth & Resources and creating a Sustainable, Steady State Economy that regards infinite growth as impossible and undesirable, and so strives for stable and robust markets, employment, production, and consumption rates in an economically efficient way through such principles as Recycle, Reuse, Reduce, Repair [and Restore].

3. Encouraging [Relocalized] Regionalized Commerce and Local Self-sufficiency of foods and basic necessities while working towards Energy Independence, Carbon Neutrality, and the Peacetime Economy in a strategic and holistic partnership between government, private enterprise, and our communities.

4. Choosing democracy over empire through Fair Trade, not Free Trade, repudiating military, political, and economic hegemony over other nations and peoples, and moderating the disparity of wealth so that it is in better accord with the natural diversity of personal industry, interest, and ability.

5. Ensuring Diversity, Democracy, Decentralization, Plurality, and Equal Opportunity in the public, private, and commons sectors of the economy, both with respect to individual participants and the kinds of structures, organizations, and businesses they may form.

6. Emphasizing Stewardship and Fiduciary Responsibility in the Marketplace over traditional ownership which only assumes the rewards associated with possession [and non-productive growth].

7. Advocating Freedom and Innovation in the Humanized Marketplace by limiting regulations and disincentives to economic activity only where the well-being of the environment, society, and community necessitates such, and generally emphasizing Middle-sized Government to accomplish this.

8. Following the Precautionary Principle (even while also promoting new research and developing a high technology economy), because our long term best interest lies in waiting for a scientific consensus about the dangers of specific new technologies before utilizing them; we should conservatively heed even a minority view calling for caution.

from Oregon Green Party (Eric Douglas)
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How We Measure Progress (real wealth)
The GPI starts with the same personal consumption data that the GDP is based on, but then makes some crucial distinctions. It adjusts for factors such as income distribution, adds factors such as the value of household and volunteer work, forests, wetlands, agricultural lands, non renewable resources such as oil, minerals, rainforests, and subtracts factors such as the costs of deforestation, crime and pollution.

Because the GDP and the GPI are both measured in monetary terms, they can be compared on the same scale. Measurements that make up the GPI include:

Income Distribution
Both economic theory and common sense tell us that the poor benefit more from a given increase in their income than do the rich. Accordingly, the GPI rises when the poor receive a larger percentage of national income, and falls when their share decreases.

Housework, Volunteering, and Higher Education
Much of the most important work in society is done in household and community settings: childcare, home repairs, volunteer work, and so on. The GDP ignores these contributions because no money changes hands. The GPI includes the value of this work figured at the approximate cost of hiring someone to do it. The GPI also takes into account the non-market benefits associated with a more educated population.

Crime
Crime imposes large economic costs on individuals and society in the form of legal fees, medical expenses, damage to property, and the like. The GDP treats such expenses as additions to well-being. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs arising from crime.

Resource Depletion
If today’s economic activity depletes the physical resource base available for tomorrow, then it is not creating well-being; rather, it is borrowing it from future generations. The GDP counts such borrowing as current income. The GPI, by contrast, counts the depletion or degradation of wetlands, forests, farmland, and nonrenewable minerals (including oil) as a current cost.

Pollution
The GDP often counts pollution as a double gain: Once when it is created, and then again when it is cleaned up. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs of air and water pollution as measured by actual damage to human health and the environment.

Long-Term Environmental Damage
Climate change, ozone depletion, and nuclear waste management are long-term costs arising from the use of fossil fuels, chlorofluorocarbons, and atomic energy, respectively. These costs are unaccounted for in ordinary economic indicators. The GPI treats as costs the consumption of certain forms of energy and of ozone-depleting chemicals. It also assigns a cost to carbon emissions to account for the catastrophic economic, environmental, and social effects of global warming.

Changes in Leisure Time
As a nation becomes wealthier, people should have more latitude to choose between work and free time for family or other activities. In recent years, however, the opposite has occurred. The GDP ignores this loss of free time, but the GPI treats leisure as most Americans do—as something of value. When leisure time increases, the GPI goes up; when Americans have less of it, the GPI goes down.

Defensive Expenditures
The GDP counts as additions to well-being the money people spend to prevent erosion in their quality of life or to compensate for misfortunes of various kinds. Examples are the medical and repair bills from automobile accidents, commuting costs, and household expenditures on pollution control devices such as water filters. The GPI counts such "defensive" expenditures as most Americans do: as costs rather than as benefits.

Lifespan of Consumer Durables & Public Infrastructure
The GDP confuses the value provided by major consumer purchases (e.g., home appliances) with the amount Americans spend to buy them. This hides the loss in well-being that results when products wear out quickly. The GPI treats the money spent on capital items as a cost, and the value of the service they provide year after year as a benefit. This applies both to private capital items and to public infrastructure, such as highways.

Dependence on Foreign Assets
If a nation allows its capital stock to decline, or if it finances consumption out of borrowed capital, it is living beyond its means. The GPI counts net additions to the capital stock as contributions to well-being, and treats money borrowed from abroad as reductions. If the borrowed money is used for investment, the negative effects are canceled out. But if the borrowed money is used to finance consumption, the GPI declines.

from Genuine Progress Indicator

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Why haven't we gone to the GPI metric already?

"In this Age of Deceit, it is a revolutionary act to tell the truth."

 

(series: end of part 1 - continued in part 2)