In Berlin, the 5-6 March, The Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation, represented by Stephen Hinton, will participate in the European Sustainable Phosphorus Conference with its simulation of how dividend-bearing pollutant fees can apply to phosphorus in the circular economy.
Continue reading “Simulation of dividend-bearing pollutant fees launches in Berlin”
FOR BUSINESS TO SERVE HUMANITY THE POLICY FRAMEWORK THAT SURROUNDS IT MUST BE FIT FOR PURPOSE. CURRENT PERFORMANCE SUGGESTS THAT THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM BADLY NEEDS REFORMING. IT IS DRIVING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR TO EXTRACT FROM NATURE BEYOND NATURAL LIMITS. IT IS TRANSFERRING WEALTH UPWARDS AND IN GENERAL CREATING A LUSTRELESS SOCIETY. ECONOMIC FISCAL REFORM IS THE TERM BEING USED TO DESCRIBE THE CHANGE.
Signals of blatant dissatisfaction with economic policy and the functioning of the economic system have been increasing recently. The term Environmental Fiscal Reform, which first appeared in the early 2000s, appears more frequently amid signs that the economic system itself is coming under pressure. Fiscal reform is about what governments do with the taxes they collect. The guidance they are given from mainstream economists is seriously under doubt. In the run-up to the climate talks in Paris later this year, business leaders and environmentalists alike are asking for serious reforms.
This edition of signals produced in cooperation with the Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation. Continue reading “EFR Newsletter JANUARY 2015 Vol. 1 Issue 1”
Henry George, perhaps the best-known economist from the end of the US Wild West era, pointed out that with progress comes poverty. This is ever more true today. Communities, once places that were home to people with the skills and tools to provide most of what you needed, from midwives to undertakers, from roofers to foundation layers, are now mere dormitory units serving in a global network of corporations. As the fortunes of corporations change, and their hunt for cheaper labour takes them offshore, it can happen that dormitory areas are thrown into poverty. Poverty, then, is the other side of the coin of progress. And most seem to accept it.
But attitudes are starting to change. People are starting to understand that living local economies can withstand the whims of corporate relocation. People are starting to see that helping each other is a better deal than finding ways of getting people to pay for literally everything in a monetarized world rapidly going nowhere.
Continue reading “Do mutual aid networks mean new life for local economies?”
One phrase from this blog struck me; Now we have practically nowhere to go. To all the people working with disaster mitigation I implore you to scenario-study what a sudden fall in oil and gas supply would mean for the society you are charged with protecting. There are ways of handling this apart from the sort of mass-death that a several million city in minus 20 degrees C might find itself.
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why cheap fuels act to create economic growth. In this post, we will look at some supporting data showing how this connection works. The data is over a very long time period–some of it going back to the Year 1 C. E.
We know that there is a close connection between energy use (and in fact oil use) and economic growth in recent years.
In this post, we will see how close the connection has been, going back to the Year 1 CE. We will also see that economies that can leverage their human energy with inexpensive supplemental energy gain an advantage over other economies. If this energy becomes high cost, we will see that countries lose their advantage over other countries, and their economic growth rate slows.
A brief summary of my view discussed in Part 1 regarding how inexpensive…
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Kunskapsnivå: medel – hög
Huvudämne: miljöavgifter med återbäring som styrmedel för hållbar utveckling
Målgrupp: representanter för organisationer engagerade i miljö, klimat mm. som vill vet mer om hur styrmedel kan hjälpa till i utvecklingen. Tjänstemän som arbetar inom ekonomi och miljöpolicy.
Fördelarna med att delta: simulering är ett effektivt sätt att få inblick i olika faktorer och hyr de samverkar/motverkar. Bl.a. illustreras hur viktigt det är med – vad som kommuniceras, storleken på avgiften, tillgång till teknik, prisbilder totalt m.fler.
TID: 9:30 – 12:30
DATUM: 27 mars 2015
PLATS: Citykonditoriet konferens Adolf Fredriks Kyrkogata 10 111 37 Stockholm Continue reading “(IN SWEDISH) Supplemental environmental fees simulation Stockholm 27 March”
Great analysis by Swedish Professor on economy and oil – the long view. We ARE in changes times and that means there are opportunities to form our society how we want.
Last Monday in January on the “Report” news programme of Sweden’s most widely watched TV channel, SVT1, they discussed future economic outlooks and they stated that the economic growth prognoses from the Sweden’s National Institute of Economic Research over the past five years had been excessively optimistic. The Institute has been projecting future economic growth of approximately 3% per year. Every prognosis has proven incorrect and the Report programmer asked, “what will happen if there can no longer be rapid economic growth?” One answer is that it is the unemployed who will pay the price. Klas Eklund, senior economist at the Swedish bank SEB, stated his opinion that the forecasters at the National Institute of Economic Research had been far too optimistic and that most people now understand this.
Historically, economic downturns have always been followed by growth but Klas Eklund now believes that this coupling is no longer valid…
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Complementary currencies like the Bristol Pound act as vouchers for national currency. You swap one Bristol Pound for a Bank of England pound at a 1:1 or 1:0,9 rate. The benefit of a currency like that is that it encourages money to stay in the local economy (jobs with it). The Bristol Pound is valid only locally.
The question is, can complementary currencies take a next step, towards keeping money locally AND stimulating the green economy – an economy where nutrients recycle instead of being brought from outside (entailing a large expenditure of fossil fuel) and an economy where wind, biomass and sun provide the energy.
A recent updated version of a report from Stephen Hinton Consulting demonstrates one way that might be achieved.
The vouchers are not swapped for national currency but for sorted biomass, and for promises to sequester carbon in the soil.
Learn more about this proposal in the white paper.
This video explains the monetary system in simple terms. It demonstrates how to use points in the system to control its overall functioning. It shows how it is possible, applying the principles of control and feedback the way control engineering steers physical machines, to ensure that the economy runs clean and provides for citizens at the same time.
Learn more
Environmental Fiscal Reform
According to NOAA, 2014 broke temperature records:
The data show that global warming has not slowed, as some have proposed. Says Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change: “The record temperatures last year should focus the minds of governments across the world on the scale of the risks that climate change is creating, and the urgency of the action that is required, including an international agreement to strongly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to be reached at the United Nations climate change summit in Paris in December 2015,”
READ MORE article on BBC News
