Category:Externalities

GreenPolicy360 has an intense focus on externalities as industrial-produced carbon and chemical emissions discharged as 'smog' and 'greenhouse gas' into the Earth's atmosphere.

Our GreenPolicy founder/siterunner's climate-science work and activism, beginning in the the 1970s with Congressman George E. Brown of the U.S. House of Representatives, has attempted to highlight green science developed as a body of data, knowledge and political action to address climate change as a global threat and crisis.

The costs and threats of externalities -- from near-surface air pollution impacting health in cities and regions, to carbon dioxide and methane emissions that are changing and threatening the Earth's atmosphere, producing global warming and climate change across all boundaries of the Earth.

A threat to the Commons, global warming/climate change is our generations 'biggest challenge'.

Environmental Security

Human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – are a primary driver of climate change – and present one of the world’s most pressing challenges.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-scientists-think-100-of-global-warming-is-due-to-humans

SJS/GreenPolicy360 -- We/GreenPolicy360 recommend a new descriptor for emissions-externalities-carbon pricing -- Not a tax, let's call it...

+Emissions Cost... +EC

Vorsorgeprinzip at GreenPolicy360

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorsorgeprinzip

https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental_issue_report_2001_22

https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental_issue_report_2001_22/issue-22-part-17.pdf/view

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen

The By-Products of an Industrial Age

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Atmospheric_Science

SJS / Siterunner: A worldwide environmental protection movement began to take on momentum in the 1960s. A growing realization that human impact on Earth's systems enabling life were at risk and the dangers were multiplying became a new politics. The tag "green" was given to these diverse political, business, and educational efforts. Green politics covers a vast array of endeavors and initiatives and your GreenPolicy360 siterunner has participated in green environmental efforts since the mid 1960s. Environmental security work included legislative initiatives with US Congressman George E. Brown, and his 1970 and 1980s coalitions and outreach, and work on policy proposals with California Governor Jerry Brown, especially in drafting the 1992 presidential campaign platform. This formative work was key in my drafting work and putting forward a founding US national Green Party platform.

George E. Brown Jr -- Governor Jerry Brown -- Jerry Brown 92 Presidential Platform -- U.S. Green Party Founding Platform

Adding Environmental full-cost accounting and eco-nomics as an expressed body of thought, I believed was an essential component of the US Green Platform that I was charged with drafting.

The attempt to address the costs of global/local emissions and externalities that are human-caused has continued since the late 1970s and first National Climate Act legislation, that was authored by Congressman Brown.

My hope continues that more rational, comprehensive definitions of security, of real and sustainable security for nations and communities would motivate actions across the globe to preserve and protect life.

Human responsibility to measure and manage to avoid harmful and potential tragic consequences is in our hands.

Local and far-sighted actions are part of a green vision -- a damage-control mission that focuses on protecting life and health.

Classic liberal capitalism does not take into account "Externalities" ... These missing costs, an environmental full-cost accounting, are systemically profound in climate change.

The theory of "The Invisible Hand" does not take into account and factor in to climate change the price of carbon burning activities.

Identifying externalities, begins to capture some of these new visions and ideas.

As business and politics moves into the 21st century we must advanced our awareness of full-cost eco-nomics.

For three decades, as environmental advocates, we have pressed green discussion/debate and decision-making.

Now is the time to recognize the scope of the challenge and to act together across boundaries, cooperatively.

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Environmental full-cost accounting, Climate change and politics

True-cost pricing position from the founding US Green Party Platform

Environmental full-cost accounting @GreenPolicy360

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting

Eco-nomics

Environmental full-cost accounting

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The Challenge of Acting for the Commons

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Commons

Triple-bottom line

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Triple_Bottom_Line

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Nature's 'Invisible Hand'

Mother Nature's Invisible Hand Strikes Back Against the Carbon Economy

The growing impact of climate change is exposing the key fallacy at the heart of the hydrocarbon economy: Big Oil cannot simply exempt itself from the natural economy governing all things in this closed system called planet Earth...

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/greatacceleration2015-150115075518-conversion-gate02/95/great-acceleration-2015-1-638.jpg?cb=1431802701

Externalities... a Generation Legacy

An externality is, according to Investopedia, a "consequence of an economic activity that is experienced by unrelated third parties." And externalities can be either positive or negative. It's easy to identify the positive externalities of the hydrocarbon economy. Oil has powered a higher standard of living for millions of people in the global North. Petrochemicals have generated such an agricultural bounty that the United States alone discards up to 40 percent of the food it produces annually without risking famine - yet. And cheap plastic manufacturing allows even many of the poorest members of rich economies unprecedented access to low-cost consumer goods.

On the other hand, the hydrocarbon economy has negatively externalized the impact of its business model by emitting greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases - without ever paying for the actual cost of those emissions insofar as they impact the ecosystems upon which their businesses and, increasingly, the lives of their customers depend...

Market Corrections

In 2008, the environmental thinker Lester Brown wrote about the inherent blindness of the invisible hand. Brown lamented the "fundamental weaknesses" preventing it from incorporating "the indirect costs of producing goods" into market prices and bemoaned the fact that it doesn't "value nature's services properly." In the short term, Brown was right. But he underestimated the power of an even larger "economy" at work in the self-correcting system called "planet Earth."

In less than a decade, Mother Nature's ever more visible hand emerged as a force punishing the "market inefficiencies" and rampant externalization of the hydrocarbon economy. The best indicator of this correction is the mounting loss of "ecosystem services." These are the common goods upon which human civilization - and, truth be told, all life - depends. Yet, humans simply take them for granted.

It's the clean, clear water, life-sustaining oxygen and life-giving soil.

It's the carbon-capturing forests and carbon-retaining power of the oceans.

It's the 1/32 of the planet that is arable land.

It's the Arctic region with it crucial permafrost "carbon banks" found in the earth's heretofore frozen regions.

Permafrost matters because its long-frozen layers safely store greenhouse gases that slowly accumulated over the course of thousands of years. New research estimates a potential $43 trillion global economic impact should those "hundreds of billions" of tons of carbon dioxide and "billions of tons" of methane be released into the atmosphere by the rapidly warming Arctic. As Pacific Standard points out, that bill "isn't a total cost to be spread out over several decades - it's how much we'd have to set aside today to pay for the damage done by melting frozen soil, or permafrost, in the Arctic." And yet more new research shows that Arctic regions are warming twice as fast as the world average because the solar-reflecting properties of the ice and snow are diminishing with each passing year...

Also diminishing each year are the unparalleled "ecosystem services" of the oceans, forests and other food webs that sustain earth's interwoven fabric of life. Based on calculations by scientists at the United Nations University, the world forfeits a "staggering $6.3 trillion to $10.6 trillion" each year just from land degradation. That's roughly "10-17% of global GDP." What are the services lost? Properly cared for land provides "food, poverty reduction, clean water, climate and disease regulation and nutrients cycling."

Hydrocarbon-obsessed humans have long ignored these opportunity costs, but Mother Nature factors it all into her bottom line. And we are running a massive budget deficit. That's why tabulating "environmental services" is crucial to understanding the environmental deficit at the core of the hydrocarbon economy - and it's crucial if human beings want to avoid the ultimate bankruptcy of extinction.

More greenhouse gases equal more warming, equals more carbon released from permafrost, equals less carbon captured by soils, plus oceans equals more warming. On it goes until nature, like theoretically free markets, eventually enforces equilibrium.

Market corrections are coming... earth is in our hands