freediver
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At my desk.
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Has anyone read this book? (Natural Capitalism)
http://www.natcap.org/ http://www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid5.php
It goes through the ways that industry can save money by conserving resources and reducing emissions and pollution.
Some interesting bits:
p159-169 Green Tax Shift - broadens the concept to include all forms of waste, extraction of non-renewables and destruction of ecological services. Not sure how far you can extend this rpactically, but many European nations are. It acknowledges how European taxation has undermined jobs and describes how they are changing the system (p14 also).
p197 - GM crops undermining organic crops by increasing insect resistance to natural insecticides.
p191 - compares US agricultural subsidies etc to the soviet economy
p192-196 - reduced crop output due to topsoil loss - this is starting to reverse the 'green revolution' in many places, reducing agricultural output. This threat is alrger than I had realised.
p153 - ecosystem services - scientific statement on the value, their destruction and our inability to replace them, gives some examples and an economic value
p60 - waste is counted as GDP, and many important services people do are not, the destruction of many assets is ignored, thus GDP can (and does) hide negative growth in our societies
p53, index of social health is going down while GDP going up
p19 - In 1998 there was more destruction from extreme weather than all of the 80's, compounded by deforestation and climate change. Water, arable land and fish availability declining since 80's
p194 - risk due to lack of diversity on crops that provide most of our food. Diversity and adaptability are the key to overcoming climate change, as well as pests etc [there is no market mechanism to encourage diversity before it is too late - should we tax the most common crops?
p200 - 15% of global food already grown in cities
p201 - example of transport subsidies - strawberry yoghurt in Europe - 13000 miles of transport, despite 'local' origins
p202 - pig farming innovation, reducing emissions, producing mulch, friendler to the animals
p204 - agriculture produces 25% of greenhouse gasses. This can be reversed so they start absorbing a significant quantitiy of greenhouse gasses.
From p 261:
For all their power and vitality, markets are only tools. They make a good servant but a bad master and a worse religion. They can be used to accomplish many important tasks, but they can't do everything, and it's a dangerous delusion to begin to believe that they can - especially when they begin to replace ethics or politics. America may now be discovering this, and has begun it's retreat from the recent flirtation with economic fundamentalism. That theology treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billlion years' design experience as casually discardable, and the future as worthless. (At a 10 percent real discount rate, nothing is worth much for long, and nobody should have children.)
The 1980's extolled a selfish attitude that counted only what was countable, not what really counted.
Economic efficiency is an admirable means only so long as one remembers it is not an end in itself. Markets are meant to be efficient, not sufficient; aggresive and competitive, not fair. Markets were never meant to achieve community or integrity, beauty or justice, sustainability or sacredness - and, by themselves, they don't. To fulfill the wider perpose of being human, civilisations have invented politics, ethics, and religion. Only they can reveal worthy goals for the tools of the economic process.
Some market theologians promote a fashionable conceit that governments should have no responsibility for overseeing markets - for setting the basic rules by which market actors play. Their attitude is, let's cut budgets for meat inspection and get governments off the backs of abattoirs, and everyone who loses loved ones to toxic foos can simply sue the offenders.
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