I haven’t yet committed time to developing a cogent argument for a carbon tax over an ETS. I’m glad to discover Mr Hukin has done a better job than I would have done.

A carbon tax is based on logic.

A direct tax on carbon is honest. It has integrity.

A direct carbon tax won’t distort the market or protect polluters with ETS smoke and mirrors like Rudd & co in Australia, Obama in the USA and the Brussels-based EU bureaucracy.

To understand the smoke and mirrors nature of ETS / Cap-and-Trade, watch The Story of Cap and Trade

Taxation of natural resources and pollution according to usage and impacts is equitable.

Resource and pollution based taxation would create an environment that is designed to reward clean, careful, industrious people and punish destructive, polluting, wasteful people.

To each according to the value placed upon their productivity by the market, and from each according to the value placed upon the physical resources utilised and environmental impacts inherent in that production as determined through international political agreement.

Does that make it easier for the average worker and business owner to support resource and pollution based taxation, knowing that such a taxation system can replace labour based taxation?

I fear that in our current global paradigm of economic struggle and the quest for individual monetary advancement to the detriment of ecological health, it does not.

As far as I am aware, in Australia only the Greens have introduction of a direct tax on carbon for primary energy as a policy point.

Australian Greens Policy G1: Economics: Point 25.1 “a carbon tax levied on generators of mains-supplied electricity or gas”

Note the preceding qualifier:

“implement a gradual and long term shift in the tax system from work based taxes to taxes on natural resources and pollution including…”

However, a carbon tax is only workable within a globally binding agreement for each nation to tax polluters at equivalent levels.

Politically it doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell.

The elites who run the global economic and monetarist systems will never willingly make such a necessary concession of their personal power and economic domination, until its too late and the seeds of their hubris have borne the bitter fruit of global ecological catastrophy for us all.

That will remain so for as long a majority of people support the power system devised by the elites by placing their individual personal comforts ahead of any commitment to holistic solutions designed to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest numbers of people.

It is self-evident that taxation of a person’s labour in any degree is a form of economic slavery.

What is not so obvious is that most people acquise to this abuse of their liberty primarily through ignorance of any superior alternative paradigm.

People whose choices are largely based on fear and greed, or aversion and craving (as the Buddha taught), cannot see clearly the trap they are in and fail to understand that some pain and sacrifice in the short term can yield a correspondingly greater benefit in the longer term.

Henry George wrote “Progress and Poverty”, the greatest treatise on the evils of labour taxation and the virtues of resource based taxation, 130 years ago.

I suggest to anyone who wants to gain an understanding of why the world is in such a mess ecologically, economically, politically; read “Progress and Poverty”.

If we are to survive and prosper as successful custodians of our natural world, I believe that economic and taxation reform that the Greens have proposed for many years will have to be adopted globally within twenty years.

One hundred, or even fifty years, will be far too late and see us living in a hot, dirty, polluted world that is closer to the Christian conception of Hell than the mythical Garden of Eden, that we could re-create if we were mindful of our choices now.

The world is in desparate need of a spiritual revolution.

I go so far as to assert it is a necessary prerequisite, before we can have the economic, monetarist and taxation reforms necessary to safeguard our life-sustaining planetary ecological system.

That logically invokes a challenging question.

What religious vehicle is best suited to supporting a life-sustaining global spiritual revolution?

I may share my thoughts on that if enough people express an interest in knowing what I perceive in this matter.

The amount of paper is greater than what I can in good conscience shred and put into a worm farm.

The worms would get indigestion if they tried to eat their way through all these deals and offers!

So. I have decided: Enough is enough.

Time to take swift and decisive action to turn back to hordes of advertising memos, flyers, catalogues and booklets bombarding our letter box.

Perhaps this problem does not exist to any great extent in the USA, where the mail box is considered the domain of the Postal Service and any junk mail can be retrieved, weighed and billed/charged to the originating entity at commercial mail rates.

United States of America
The mailbox is the domain of the US Postal Service, granted by law. Therefore, no materials
other than properly stamped mail may be placed in the box. If flyers, pamphlets, etc. are
found in the box by the postal worker, they collect the pieces and return them to the
Postmaster. The items are then weighed and the firm responsible for their distribution is
charged accordingly. These rules are included in the Postal Service’s Domestic Mail Manual.

So, I need “No Junk Mail” or preferably, the more precisely worded, “No Advertising Material” stickers.

Where to get them?

I performed a quick Google search and came up with an address that Australians can write to for a free sticker.

The Distribution Standards Board (DSB) is the self-regulatory arm of the Australian Catalogue Association, whose members print and distribute around 90% of all unaddressed advertising catalogues.

The DSB members abide by a strict Code of Practice to maintain standards of privacy, litter control, cooperation with local authorities and compliance with all EPA guidelines.

DSB maintains a database of all known addresses that carry a restrictive sign on the letterbox, and provides free of charge a reflective No Advertising Material sticker, on receipt of a stamped addressed envelope to DSB Sticker PO Box 6252 Karingal Vic 3199.

The DSB provides a Hot Line for consumers to report illegal or irresponsible distribution practices.

Consumer Hotline Phone 1800 676 136

Too slow, I want to solve this now.

So, I have made my own printable page with the text “No Advertising Material” repeated twice, for two stickers.

Popping it through the laminating machine and cutting it up gives me two waterproof  signs ready to tape onto the top and front of our letter box. Photo to come later.

For now, you are welcome to download the Word and PDF versions of my simple Printable, so you can print and tape your own “No Advertising Material” sign onto your letter box.  Feel free to vary as required.

No Advertising Material Word doc

No Advertising Material PDF file

Let’s drink a toast to No More Junk!

“Environmental Challenge No 1.”
http://www.rentoid.com/blog/?p=995

This proposition made in that blog post is a tough proposition to approach from a philosophical perspective.

I’ll write this post from a Sydney/Australia centric perspective, as life in the city of Sydney is the core of my world experience and world view.

On the one hand there is the consideration that the elite decision makers are out of touch with the median urban dweller’s situation and therefore ill-equipped to make decisions appropriate to the median urban dweller.

On the other hand, there is the consideration that the elite decision makers have the outlook and perspective they enjoy because they and their families do things differently than the median urban dweller, who is situated where they are and with their outlook as a result of choices they and their families have made.

Some would argue that better equips them for decision making, while some would contend that their environment and consequently their decision making framework is biased against the interests of the mass of people.

As an aside, we cannot necessarily make predictions about the personal ecological footprints of the dwelling occupiers based solely on pictures of the dwellings.

If I take the proposition at face value, that the greatest challenge is that our decision makers inhabit an environment that is atypical of that inhabited by the greater part of the citizenry, how much further removed relatively speaking are both groups represented, being in a top 1% urban environment, compared with those eking out a subsistence existence on less than $1 per day, often without adequate safe drinking water, somewhere around 2 billion of the approaching 7 billion people on the planet.

What then are the impacts of the decisions made by the decision-makers on the 40% to 60% (wild guess) of the world’s population who have no effective political franchise via which to express their dissatisfaction with the way global affairs are governed?

Furthermore, what are the impacts of the decisions made by the greater part of the educated free citizenry of the planet, the 2 billion or so people who have a standard of living not too dissimilar from the range depicted by the images above.

While I acknowledge the effort to highlight a disparity in living circumstances in our society, and the consequent framing of perspectives between its elites and its median members, I definitely don’t consider that in itself to be our greatest challenge.

My belief is that our greatest challenge is our own individual contribution to things being the way they are.

I submit that collectively the individual choices and actions of billions of people play a far greater aggregate role in shaping our world than than the decisions made by the global power elites.

They only have power by virtue of the choices we make to cede that power to them. For example, by choosing to drive cars and buy fuel, we support and maintain an oil-dependent society that provides huge profits and massive economic, social and political power to the oil pirates. For the origin of the term “oil pirates”, I refer you to “Critical Path” by R. Buckminster Fuller.

The same applies to our usage of electricity. We demand cheap energy (collectively as a society) to run our plasma screens (I own one myself), our computers, our air conditioners (I don’t have or use A/C, this is Sydney, not Kuala Lumpur).

A few years ago, just after new years day, early in January (2006 I think it was?), hundreds of thousands of people in Sydney got literally and mentally all hot and bothered when at least quarter of a million air conditioners were turned on when the mercury rose above 40C, causing large chunks of Sydney’s power grid to shut down for up to five hours.

Our collective inability to tolerate some level of discomfort caused an effect that resulted in a much greater level of discomfort, inconvenience and resource wastage, as the contents of many thousands of refrigerators and freezers warmed and defrosted and consequently spoiled. Not to mention the impacts of lost productivity. I was attempting (in my non-airconditioned home office) to get my annual business taxation return completed and had to abandon work for the day.

That’s because I choose to do my accounts using a computer, rather than in a hand-written journal and ledger.

I saw a mother at the shopping centre today who had an entire trolley-load of disposal nappies (diapers in USA) for her baby. We’re talking at least a cubic metre here.

My mother and her maternal lineage before her, all used cloth nappies, soilage of which was returned to the earth via septic tank or sewerage treatment works and the nappies were washed and re-used many times.

No decision-maker is imposing that kind of decision on that mother. It’s her free choice to spend a small fortune on disposable nappies for the sake of convenience in our fast-paced, disposable society.

Imagine if the (wild guess here!) 50% to 70% of people on the planet who are not yet using disposal nappies, let alone driving cars and all the other ‘necessities’ of our modern urban existence were in a position to make the same choice.

That’s an awful lot of plastic, packaging, petro-chemical processing and fuel required for transport to landfill, just to dispose of infant excrement.

Personally I try to recycle everything I can, to limit the usage of energy as much as practicable, to extend the life of objects through regular maintenance and replacement of components.

One recent example is my engagement of a technician friend to replace blown capacitors in a PC power supply. We desoldered $3 equivalent worth of capacitors out of other failed PSUs and used them to repair the damaged PSU, to save throwing it out and avoid buying a $45 replacement cost PSU.

There is always a trade-off in time and convenience. It would have been much easier, faster and simpler to purchase a replacement PSU and we both could have used the time required to source the components and effect the repair to make more than $45 to cover that expense.

But we chose a more sustaining approach, out of our commitment to waste reduction, by repairing an item that still had utility.

My choice is always to evaluate the possibility of repairing the faulty item first.

For decades there have been proponents of piping Sydney’s sewerage out west through the Blue Mountains to fertilise land for food production on the central table lands.

There appears to be some kind of cultural taboo preventing this idea from gaining serious support; we prefer instead to pump our crap into the ocean where that resource is lost to us.

There are so many good ideas for resource utilisation optimisation lying fallow for want of rational consideration and social support for their implementation.

Its through the choices we each make that we create the results that we see and experience in the world today.

Consider that structural impact of our taxation system. We have a GST now which increased the cost of technician’s services by 10%. At the same time it was introduced there was a reduction of 22% sales tax off a wide range of consumer electronics items.

Consequently, people don’t get things repaired nearly as much any more. Something has broken, eg. TV not working? Toss it and buy another one. It makes better economic sense.

But what is economic sense other than a construct of the human imagination? It’s now accepted as Gospel that we must have economic growth, that recessions are bad and depressions are really terrible.

Therein lies the greatest environmental challenge in my view.

People have been conditioned to look to economic considerations as the primary framework for behavioural modification.

This is a false view of reality, as it is based on a human-created conceptual model that does not reflect physical reality.

That false view of reality, must necessarily be replaced by a model that more closely resembles physical reality, ideally encompassing an ecological framework for decision-making if we are to survive and possibly even thrive as a species heading towards 10 billions, while still maintaining an adequate degree of bio-diversity of life on earth for future generations to exercise custodianship and/or stewardship over.

That contextual switch will not soon come from the global elites, political, financial or corporate.

It must first arise as a phenomena of the mass of humanity who are committed to a sustainable future for humanity and as many other life forms on our planet as we are still in a position to preserve and protect.

Until ecology has gained the ascendancy above economy, until economics has been subsumed into a holistic conceptual framework for perception of reality, we will not see any truly transformative movement toward the type of world that may be possible.

I love to criticise our political leaders; its a national sport in Australia, as in the USA and other liberal democracies in accordance with the tradition established in ancient Athens and reborn in 18th/19th century France and the United States of America; we are fortunate indeed to possess the privilege thereof.

However, I must submit for consideration of any who reads this that it is our own good selves who must constantly seek to self-assess and re-evaluate our own choices and modify our own actions accordingly.

My belief is that http://Rentoid.com represents a valuable contribution towards this transformative shift.

Rentoid is premised around the ideal of sharing out the functional utility of objects, distributing the economic cost and benefit of physical goods amongst those whose use benefit exceeds the cost requested. Thereby extending the useful life of those physical goods so they may have the fullest use value extracted from them prior to discarding or disposal at the end of their functional utility.

How can you contribute today towards an objective that is founded in a similar premise or spirit of intention?

Together, we can be the change we want to see in the world, a proposition given to us by Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi.