natural resources have value and have a cost when used by humans... capitalist use natural resources as if they already 'owned' those resources and then claim a 'profit' when selling those resources in the 'free market'.
The fact is that when the capitalist claims to have made a profit when consuming natural resources (coal, for example) to produce energy to produce a product (electricity, for example) their accounting systems ignore many of the 'real' costs associated with the process. Because the 'real' costs are never factored into the ledger sheet, it appears that a 'profit' is made and capitalism appears to investors as a 'good' economic model.
The mining, transportation actual generation of electricity are factored into the equation. However, the value of the coal under the mountain is never 'paid' for. It is a blank spot that is not even identified in book-keeping... If it were, at the very least, identified, then it would, for book-keeping purposes be listed with a cost of 'zero' since that is what is actually paid -- as if 'donated'.
But as any idiot can recognize, the value of the coal in the ground is not zero. If, in fact, the true value of the coal were to be 'paid' it would be paid to the owners of the coal... the people and not some 'token' payment to a complicit government agency.
But as any idiot can recognize, the value of the coal in the ground is not zero. If, in fact, the true value of the coal were to be 'paid' it would be paid to the owners of the coal... the people and not some 'token' payment to a complicit government agency.
Other components are incorporated into the production cycle of electricity. Water and air are 2 obvious components and the owners of the water and air are the same 'people' of the land who own all of the natural resources of the land. These people own the sky and the sunset. They own the clouds and the forests. They own the soil and the minerals under the soil. The people are the owners of everything on, in or above the land.
There are costs associated with the use of these natural resources and there are costs associated with the depletion of these resources as well.
When the air is so fouled as to become unbreathable, that specific consequence is expensive but the cost is borne by the individual person who lives in that land and not the capitalist. It is the same when the water quality deteriorates to a point where it is undrinkable. It is the local population that is forced to carry that particular cost of purifying the water.
These are 'real' costs to producing 'a product' but these costs never appear on the 'balance sheet' of the capitalist. But the hospital bill (for example) resulting from health problems caused by lack of clean air and clean water is covered by the individual.
And, this is only about production of electricity... Natural gas and oil are also used to make electricity and the scenario would be similar to that of coal.
The story is the same for everything that is manufactured and/or produced on the planet.
The story is the same for everything that is manufactured and/or produced on the planet.
The 'bottom line' as we like to call it, is that the capitalist (who abhors socialism) steals resources from the 'commons' and uses those resources to create 'profit'. But, when asked to contribute to the health-care of the masses suffering from corporate abuse of the environment, they cry 'freedom' and 'personal responsibility' and all manner of deceptions to avoid paying for the 'raw materials' that they use.
These are similar to the deceptions the capitalist uses to avoid paying a reasonable and equitable share of taxes, and that's the truth !!!
These are similar to the deceptions the capitalist uses to avoid paying a reasonable and equitable share of taxes, and that's the truth !!!
the capitalist system is a series of 'laws' granting special 'rights' to the capitalist... how else to drain an oil field under The Gulf of Mexico or The Santa Barbara Channel ?
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use
from Grist By David Roberts
The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.
While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I’ve always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics — it makes them sound Serious — but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.
To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB asked Trucost to tally up the total “unpriced natural capital” consumed by the world’s top industrial sectors. (“Natural capital” refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; “unpriced” means that businesses don’t pay to consume them.)
It’s a huge task; obviously, doing it required a specific methodology that built in a series of assumptions. (Plenty of details in the report.) But it serves as an important signpost pointing the way to the truth about externalities.
Here’s how those costs break down:
The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).
So how much is that costing us? Trucost’s headline results are fairly stunning.
First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.
(A “region-sector” is a particular industry in a particular region — say, wheat farming in East Asia.)
Second, surprising no one, coal is the enemy of the human race. Trucost compiled rankings, both of the top environmental impacts and of the top industrial culprits.
Here are the top five biggest environmental impacts and the region-sectors responsible for them:
Click to embiggen. UNEP The biggest single environmental cost? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in China. The fifth biggest? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in North America. (This also shows what an unholy nightmare deforestation in South America is.)
Now, here are the top five industrial sectors ranked by total ecological damages imposed:
Click to embiggen. UNEP It’s coal again! This time North American coal is up at number three.
Trucost’s third big finding is the coup de grace. Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero.
That amounts to an global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.
This gets back to what I was saying at the top. The notion of “externalities” is so technical, such an economist’s term. Got a few unfortunate side effects, so just move some numbers from Column A to Column B, right?
But the UNEP report makes clear that what’s going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind.
What’s needed is not just better accounting but a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, and fast.
That means a revolution.
from Grist By David Roberts
The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.
While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I’ve always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics — it makes them sound Serious — but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.
To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB asked Trucost to tally up the total “unpriced natural capital” consumed by the world’s top industrial sectors. (“Natural capital” refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; “unpriced” means that businesses don’t pay to consume them.)
It’s a huge task; obviously, doing it required a specific methodology that built in a series of assumptions. (Plenty of details in the report.) But it serves as an important signpost pointing the way to the truth about externalities.
Here’s how those costs break down:
The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).
So how much is that costing us? Trucost’s headline results are fairly stunning.
First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.
(A “region-sector” is a particular industry in a particular region — say, wheat farming in East Asia.)
Second, surprising no one, coal is the enemy of the human race. Trucost compiled rankings, both of the top environmental impacts and of the top industrial culprits.
Here are the top five biggest environmental impacts and the region-sectors responsible for them:
Click to embiggen. UNEP The biggest single environmental cost? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in China. The fifth biggest? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in North America. (This also shows what an unholy nightmare deforestation in South America is.)
Now, here are the top five industrial sectors ranked by total ecological damages imposed:
Click to embiggen. UNEP It’s coal again! This time North American coal is up at number three.
Trucost’s third big finding is the coup de grace. Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero.
That amounts to an global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.
This gets back to what I was saying at the top. The notion of “externalities” is so technical, such an economist’s term. Got a few unfortunate side effects, so just move some numbers from Column A to Column B, right?
But the UNEP report makes clear that what’s going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind.
What’s needed is not just better accounting but a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, and fast.
That means a revolution.
Mountaintop removal mining devastates the landscape, turning areas that should be lush with forests and wildlife into barren moonscapes. Huge machines, called "draglines," push rock and dirt into nearby streams and valleys, forever burying waterways. The massive dragline in the photo, which can weigh up to 12 million pounds and be as big as an entire city block, is dwarfed by the scale of this devastation. PHOTO COURTESY OF OVEC
an abandoned water-filled anthracite strip mining pit 20 acres in size, 40′ deep, nearly 200′ feet across, 4/10s of a mile long; The pit is flooded with abandoned mine drainage that enters the pit in several fractured areas along one side. The abandoned mine water has an alkaline pH of 6.2, very low acidity levels, and iron hydroxide levels that exceed 40 parts per million (40 mg/L). The orange-ish, red color exhibited in the pit is precipitated iron oxide that has dropped our of solution and deposited naturally on the rocks around the site and at the base of the natural vegetation that has grown around the water’s edge.
Surface mining in Martin County in 1998. Fights over strip mining across Appalachia have raged for decades. (Photo: MICHAEL CLEVENGER/THE COURIER-JOURNAL)
Mark Ovaska in West Virginia: "Strip Mining Prevents Forest Fires"
Ninety years ago, during the late summer of 1921, one of the largest armed confrontations of American history other than the Civil War occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, when the struggle between coal miners and the coal companies exploded into open warfare in the Battle Of Blair Mountain. Hundreds were killed, and every weapon from rifles to machine-guns and airplanes were used. The companies, backed by what we would now call private contractor paramilitary militias and eventually the US Army, broke the union and crushed the uprising.
Simply Unbelievable -- Trump issued an Executive Order Mar. 28 to lift a moratorium on the sale of new coal leases on federal land and reevaluate the Clean Power Plan aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions from electric generation by 32 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
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