Start an Economy for the Planet.

Work to Meet Human Needs

Make polluters pay and ensure 'Green' profits, and thus 'green' markets.

Pollution-intensive production is cheaper than the cleaner alternatives, so that's what most of us must choose; but, if we make cleaner technologies cheaper, then economic self-interest and powerful marketplace forces will work for 'cleaner' actions everyday everywhere. Consumers will buy the cheapest, manufacturers will want to use it or make it, and corporations themselves will develop the science to do it. I believe it's past time to make greed select cleaner technologies and restore the environment.

We need a ‘fair playing field tilted towards the environment.' In a treaty nation, I propose polluters of air and water pay a growing, upstream tax on every unit of their pollution, with credits for removed pollutants. To enter from a non-treaty market, importers must pay a larger, excess–refundable import duty (because imports and pollution levels are uncertain). This tax then drives markets to select cleaner technologies.

Fund for a Cool Gaia

This fund could finance the worldwide demand for appropriate, clean technologies to fill basic needs. Every person gets credit for an equal share of this fund. It would be the duty of each government to distribute or use this fund to solve the worst problems of its' people. After experts have system engineered (and standardized*) alternative technologies and planned possible local applications, and voters or need-priorities have picked some, governments can use the money or technology credit to provide for the basic needs of their people. There'd be plenty of paid labor to set up and install basic technologies. Starting from scratch, it should be possible to design a financial system which resists graft.

Even poor countries could pay their people to raise and plant trees.

In arid areas windmills could provide water to solar evaporators. Solar desalinaters could restore salt-damaged farmlands or aid subsistence farmers. Arid lands could reuse water. Some potable water uses will be replaced with waste water. With the money to buy and the manpower to lay piping, waste water** will irrigate farmland.

Cities and towns could pay for light rail, solar cells, waste–to–fuel factories, cooling towers for buildings; or, any other beneficial technology or activity.

The world's factories can mass-produce anything; microchip regulators for solar or hydrogen/methane equipment, solar sensors, temperature- or pressure-difference valves, windmills, solar evaporators and concentrators, piping and hoses. In flat ponds carbon dioxide becomes feedstock, efficiently capturing sunlight to make an organic source of diesel fuel. As they travel, airplanes and ships might earn 'Fund' money by spreading beneficial chemicals, maybe Calcium or Iron.

A Spiritual Aside from the Unitarian Universalists

Four of our seven principles are:
• The inherent worth and dignity of every person
• Justice equity and compassion in human relations
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence
of which we are a part.

Community supports happiness while competition is much better at ulcers. Insisting that everybody in the world use money is a form of slavery. Multiculturalism and co-existence are both more humane goals than empire and greed.

Subsistence Farms and Life rafts and Cultural Preservation

Subsistence or folk cultures usually represent a well-balanced and healthy lifestyle that doesn't need jobs, money, or anything modern; only an undisturbed ecology. Because they make no wealth these ways of life die out. Many must join the ranks of the starving poor because they're losing habitat to often marginally–profitable export schemes such as logging, highly-poisoned cotton crops and often–destructive beef herds.

“If we can't help the needy figure out some path to dignity other than our hyper-individualism, the math of global warming will never work.” - Bill McKibben

One very easy way to ‘transform’ is to return to low-tech, low-energy ways. In the future we will develop a world value for wilderness and cultures; something to give our young to visit and explore, or even to choose to live by.

A government could also define and protect a reservation suitable for subsistence farmers or wandering hunter-gatherers and use the money to pay down its national debt. Researchers are also noting that often developing wild lands RELEASES a large amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

As an engineer and a concerned citizen I urge you to continue to fight this good fight on behalf of our planet.

Judy Wright, BSME, MSSE, Futurist

* few third-world villages have hardware stores.

** It's usually far easier to segregate sewage — to keep deleterious chemicals out of water — than to remove them before water reuse. However in a strange environment germs will be killed off. (Witness Kalamazoo, Michigan & Berlin, Germany.)

MIT has done a study of related concepts and mentions $30/ton of Carbon Dioxide or equivalent greenhouse-effect gasses released. Purchasing pollution rights is unlikely to reflect true market forces. http://mit.edu/globalchange MITJPSPGC_Rpt146.pdf