Legacy Matters

Madame:

I like it that when you politically and economically fantasize, you go all out! LOL

You ask big, complex questions, don’t you?  :)  I’m not a curmudgeon.  I’m enjoying the dickens out of the Royals and their infectious, fun enthusiasm for a game that Americans in this fast-paced society can otherwise find long and not very exciting.  We can enjoy those things.  Then we have to get busy on taking action. 

ONE stunted, skinny, weak little earthworm.  That’s all I found on a sidewalk after a hard and not brief rain.  Considering I walked over 200 feet, there should have been dozens. 

But then I remembered that a management company paid a “lawn care” company to “care for” the grass around that sidewalk.

What should we do, you ask?

One small thing is to quit silently agreeing that a “little” eco-injury is okay. 

REPEATEDLY.

When we want-what-we-want for various aesthetic  (“I like the way the grass—yes, I know, it’s grass only and mono-grass at that—looks”), selfish (“I like the way things are; I don’t want to do something different”),  justifying (“What I do won’t make a difference”), conditioning (“But it’s always been this way”), arrogant (“No one is going to tell me what to do”), etc. reasons, we pile up the eco-injuries. 

The strands of life are intricately interwoven, and our awareness and discernment  of the interwoven effects of our actions is far too limited.  Severing or twisting the strands—and a great number of them—is not GOING to have consequences, it IS having consequences.

Plan B, the book (and its continually updated versions) by Lester Brown, lays out what we must do.  It requires first, fortitude.  We the people must say that we will accept short-term pain and hardship—and a lasting change in habits and routines—in order to attain intermediate and long term benefit and sustainability.  We must say that we will not have our short-term selfish instincts exploited by the unscrupulous systems managers of the destructive status quo, by all the “can’ts” of the naysayers and problem pointers who have no sustainable solutions of their own, but only vague generalities.  We must say that we are thinking of our descendants, our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, our cousins, our friends’ children—the future Americans and future humans on this planet.  We must “get the wind in our sails” by embracing many of the ideas in the now nearly 25 year old documentary “After the Warming.”

To do that will mean we can’t be diverted by pseudo-solutions that are wonky, manipulatable, and only half-solutions at best.  Credits, caps, and other complex solutions will not be very effective. 

People, businesses, and markets react to, and plan well, on things they can directly see, anticipate, and measure.  That means a gradually increasing direct tax on fossil fuels and associated warming substances, with the heaviest taxation on the most polluting and most climate change contributing, until those substances and practices reach their true social costs.  With that sort of direct and painfully clear indicator, things will change rapidly, and a sustainable energy economy will come into existence.  Ingenuity and enthusiastic energy opened up by doing something people can believe in and get behind eagerly will accelerate the process even more.  The renewable energy economy is not a far off dream; it is waiting on the edge of this one, and the world is waiting on a hypocritical America to move, to trigger the momentum that will tide turn in the right direction. 

The collected taxes should go directly to practices that attempt to ameliorate the effects of climate change and, ideally, move to stabilize the change.  In the long term, the tax can be part of a broader paradigm of heavily taxing things that are injurious to the common good, and easing (or even largely eliminating) taxes on things which contribute to the common good.

Of course, the tax should be rebated back to at least those payers (directly or indirectly) who are at the poverty level, and maybe a bit beyond.  What it should not do in any way is go to the fossil fuel companies and other polluters.  Those will either change and embrace renewability and sustainability, or they can go the way of the horse and buggy industry.  Their past actions have done the opposite of earning them the right to any favorable treatment.

We are in the beginnings of crisis management as to climate change.  It will get worse before it stabilizes.  When we first stabilize, then drop back to 350 ppm, we will have reached the sizable turning point.  Of course, we may be a planet re-covered in trees by then.

This tax will have pain.  This tax will have negative consequences, from lost jobs, disrupted lives, to agonizing short-term hardships and inefficiencies—in a world economy where fossil fuels affects, directly or indirectly, nearly everything, any number of things , some of which we cannot foresee, are going to be disrupted, have bad side effects, or worse—when the instant and disposable thoughtless economy transitions and shifts.  This tax will have recessionary effects that could last 10 years—on people and small businesses already so economically and structurally weakened by the plutocratic transformation that six years after the Great Recession we have not really recovered.

But once that transition period has reached the synergy point, we will see the benefits reverberate and cascade, and the pain will rapidly turn to improvement.  We will reap many benefits.  We will assume well the mantle to be good stewards.  We will be, for the first time in a very long time, rightly and continually proud as a society—even a world society—at the results of our courage, hard work, and sacrifice.  We may even rediscover each other, and a slower pace that comes with reconnection.

And we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say, “I SACRIFICED FOR YOU, I HELPED CHANGE THE WORLD FOR YOU.  I LOVE YOU IN REAL DEEDS THAT TRULY MATTER, NOT JUST WORDS.”

“I DIDN’T LEAVE YOU A NIGHTMARE WORLD.”

Or we can have the opposite conversation.