The political leaders of this country cannot possibly lead us to environmental and sustainable success. This is because they are entirely dependent on the system of environmental exploitation that causes the problems in the first place.
The Clinton-Obama energy plan - Politico.com
Clinton thinks burning tires is a good way to produce power. Obama thinks that coal-to-liquids is a good idea. Why? Because both of these ideas make money for large groups that can vote for them. They don't support these ideas because the are good for the world (they are both extraordinarily bad ideas).
There will be no major elected political leaders who push real sustainability because real sustainability is bad for business, and business is what drives the political system.
Capitalistic business isn't the only way to do things of course. The market works the way that it does for the same reason that the game of Monopoly works the way that it does. There is a set of rules that creates the dynamics we see. In the real world it is the same. Decades ago a small group of powerful men wrote the rules of our monetary system based on some ideas about how the economy should work. Of course these rules are designed with many goals, but stability among them, and fairness to everyone not.
Have you ever asked yourself "What, exactly, is money"? Paper? Gold? Value? Labor? None of the above. The answer is that money is simply barter. Barter is anything you can trade with someone else to get what you want. It could be goods (I'll trade you a pepper for that potato), it could be services (I'll till your garden for that firewood), it could be information (I'll teach you how to vermipost for first pick of your tomato harvest). If money is simply barter, then what is so special about it that the government makes, distributes and enforces the rules for cash?
On a large scale barter is inefficient. That is, it slows down trade and is difficult to tax. To make trade more efficient we introduce the idea of money, an item of barter that nearly everyone accepts. As long as everyone has some, trade is much easier because everybody has something to trade with someone else. Early on gold and silver made good money because they were impossible to counterfeit and the supply grew at a rate that roughly matched the quantity of goods that were traded. Gold is itself a good as it is pretty (and today useful in an industrial sense), so it has a bit of intrinsic value, but it is important to understand that this intrinsic value is unrelated to it's utility as money.
For money to be useful one has to have some. Thus, the money supply in an economy must grow and contract at a rate equal to that of the stuff available for trade. When the money supply does not expand or contract at the same rate as the stuff, you get inflation or deflation, the value of money relative to stuff in general goes up or down. This is a bad thing for most people, it makes it difficult to know how much money you should trade your for your stuff, and it changes the buying power of the money that you have saved.
If someone discovers a way to make lots of good, useful stuff and starts flooding the market with it (say, oil or products derived from oil, like plastic), you really need to add more money to the system. Otherwise money starts getting concentrated in one place, starving other parts of the economy of this essential barter item, slowing down trade and preventing people (who, having become depending on trading with money, no longer have viable barter networks and practices) from obtaining the things that they need.
So, as a government, how do you get money into the system? You can't add gold, there is a finite supply of it, once it is all in circulation you end up with deflation and depression. One way is to create what we call 'Fractional Reserve Banking'. We already have institutions where people store the money they aren't using. That unused money can be lent out, for a fee, for other people to use. This is a very reasonable full reserve banking system. Money is kept in circulation where it can be useful.
As a banker, you have to have money (deposits) to lend it out in order to bring in more money. If you could just pretend to have deposits to lend out you could bring in money even if you had already lent out all the deposits you had available. Essentially you, as a banker, create money and lend it out just as if you were lending out real deposits. The idea of gold as money is obviously redundant in this sort of system, so you naturally unlink your currency from gold and bootstrap into a 'fiat' system. This is a great deal for you as a banker, you essentially get paid simply by virtue of being a 'bank', a special kind of organization that has the privilege of creating money. This also increases the amount of money in circulation, helping to ensure that everybody has something to trade to get the things they need. Win-Win situation, right?
Not quite. The original goal is to make sure that there is enough 'money' in the system to allow people to easily trade goods. This fractional reserve fiat system does that, but it also attaches a lot of strings to that money. You bootstrap into this system with a quantity of money in the system. A good portion of this money is owned outright, no strings attached. Now when you need to add money to the system every unit of that new money has strings attached to it. Someone, somewhere borrowed that money into existence and is paying for that service. Until such time as the loan that created the money is paid off, someone is paying interest on that money.
This is a simplified view of how the system really works. In the real world the Federal Reserve, a private bank that does business with the government, exchanges government 'bonds' for dollars in order to increase or decrease the money supply.
This system of rules does pretty much what it's brilliant, powerful and very rich creators wanted. It gives the government a way to control the money supply, a very useful and necessary thing, and it creates a system with dynamics that tend to concentrate wealth with the wealthy, a very useful thing for the wealthy, and not so great for the other 99.99% of us.
The system is designed specifically to create the sort of capitalistic economy we have. It is carefully designed, controlled and balanced by people with power to benefit people with power as much as possible without falling apart. It is not designed to be stable or fair, or to primarily ensure that useful barter is easily available to people who need it. It requires constant tinkering and tweaking to keep it from toppling over and it is exquisitely sensitive to market conditions. This is a system designed to maximize the rate of extraction of natural resources and the accumulation of wealth, or, in other words, it is designed for capitalism.
Is it possible to have a system that maximizes the extraction of natural resources in a sustainable way? Can it do that if there are real people with their greed and selfishness in play? Nope. At least, not with the shallow culture of consumerism that exists today. If we had a culture that recognized consumerism as one of the deep roots of unsustainable practices then yes, it might work. But our monetary and financial systems are one of the major factors in the conversion of our culture into a vapid consumeristic herd. If we are to build a culture of sustainability we must eliminate the market forces that push culture away from sustainability. We have to change the rules that make us what we are.
Political leaders are elected by voters. Voters vote for leaders that they think will make rules that make it easer for voters to consume more. Voters want to consume more because they are embedded in a culture that is driven to consume by the rules it has created. The rules are created by political leaders.
The Clinton-Obama energy plan - Politico.com
Clinton thinks burning tires is a good way to produce power. Obama thinks that coal-to-liquids is a good idea. Why? Because both of these ideas make money for large groups that can vote for them. They don't support these ideas because the are good for the world (they are both extraordinarily bad ideas).
There will be no major elected political leaders who push real sustainability because real sustainability is bad for business, and business is what drives the political system.
Capitalistic business isn't the only way to do things of course. The market works the way that it does for the same reason that the game of Monopoly works the way that it does. There is a set of rules that creates the dynamics we see. In the real world it is the same. Decades ago a small group of powerful men wrote the rules of our monetary system based on some ideas about how the economy should work. Of course these rules are designed with many goals, but stability among them, and fairness to everyone not.
Have you ever asked yourself "What, exactly, is money"? Paper? Gold? Value? Labor? None of the above. The answer is that money is simply barter. Barter is anything you can trade with someone else to get what you want. It could be goods (I'll trade you a pepper for that potato), it could be services (I'll till your garden for that firewood), it could be information (I'll teach you how to vermipost for first pick of your tomato harvest). If money is simply barter, then what is so special about it that the government makes, distributes and enforces the rules for cash?
On a large scale barter is inefficient. That is, it slows down trade and is difficult to tax. To make trade more efficient we introduce the idea of money, an item of barter that nearly everyone accepts. As long as everyone has some, trade is much easier because everybody has something to trade with someone else. Early on gold and silver made good money because they were impossible to counterfeit and the supply grew at a rate that roughly matched the quantity of goods that were traded. Gold is itself a good as it is pretty (and today useful in an industrial sense), so it has a bit of intrinsic value, but it is important to understand that this intrinsic value is unrelated to it's utility as money.
For money to be useful one has to have some. Thus, the money supply in an economy must grow and contract at a rate equal to that of the stuff available for trade. When the money supply does not expand or contract at the same rate as the stuff, you get inflation or deflation, the value of money relative to stuff in general goes up or down. This is a bad thing for most people, it makes it difficult to know how much money you should trade your for your stuff, and it changes the buying power of the money that you have saved.
If someone discovers a way to make lots of good, useful stuff and starts flooding the market with it (say, oil or products derived from oil, like plastic), you really need to add more money to the system. Otherwise money starts getting concentrated in one place, starving other parts of the economy of this essential barter item, slowing down trade and preventing people (who, having become depending on trading with money, no longer have viable barter networks and practices) from obtaining the things that they need.
So, as a government, how do you get money into the system? You can't add gold, there is a finite supply of it, once it is all in circulation you end up with deflation and depression. One way is to create what we call 'Fractional Reserve Banking'. We already have institutions where people store the money they aren't using. That unused money can be lent out, for a fee, for other people to use. This is a very reasonable full reserve banking system. Money is kept in circulation where it can be useful.
As a banker, you have to have money (deposits) to lend it out in order to bring in more money. If you could just pretend to have deposits to lend out you could bring in money even if you had already lent out all the deposits you had available. Essentially you, as a banker, create money and lend it out just as if you were lending out real deposits. The idea of gold as money is obviously redundant in this sort of system, so you naturally unlink your currency from gold and bootstrap into a 'fiat' system. This is a great deal for you as a banker, you essentially get paid simply by virtue of being a 'bank', a special kind of organization that has the privilege of creating money. This also increases the amount of money in circulation, helping to ensure that everybody has something to trade to get the things they need. Win-Win situation, right?
Not quite. The original goal is to make sure that there is enough 'money' in the system to allow people to easily trade goods. This fractional reserve fiat system does that, but it also attaches a lot of strings to that money. You bootstrap into this system with a quantity of money in the system. A good portion of this money is owned outright, no strings attached. Now when you need to add money to the system every unit of that new money has strings attached to it. Someone, somewhere borrowed that money into existence and is paying for that service. Until such time as the loan that created the money is paid off, someone is paying interest on that money.
This is a simplified view of how the system really works. In the real world the Federal Reserve, a private bank that does business with the government, exchanges government 'bonds' for dollars in order to increase or decrease the money supply.
This system of rules does pretty much what it's brilliant, powerful and very rich creators wanted. It gives the government a way to control the money supply, a very useful and necessary thing, and it creates a system with dynamics that tend to concentrate wealth with the wealthy, a very useful thing for the wealthy, and not so great for the other 99.99% of us.
The system is designed specifically to create the sort of capitalistic economy we have. It is carefully designed, controlled and balanced by people with power to benefit people with power as much as possible without falling apart. It is not designed to be stable or fair, or to primarily ensure that useful barter is easily available to people who need it. It requires constant tinkering and tweaking to keep it from toppling over and it is exquisitely sensitive to market conditions. This is a system designed to maximize the rate of extraction of natural resources and the accumulation of wealth, or, in other words, it is designed for capitalism.
Is it possible to have a system that maximizes the extraction of natural resources in a sustainable way? Can it do that if there are real people with their greed and selfishness in play? Nope. At least, not with the shallow culture of consumerism that exists today. If we had a culture that recognized consumerism as one of the deep roots of unsustainable practices then yes, it might work. But our monetary and financial systems are one of the major factors in the conversion of our culture into a vapid consumeristic herd. If we are to build a culture of sustainability we must eliminate the market forces that push culture away from sustainability. We have to change the rules that make us what we are.
Political leaders are elected by voters. Voters vote for leaders that they think will make rules that make it easer for voters to consume more. Voters want to consume more because they are embedded in a culture that is driven to consume by the rules it has created. The rules are created by political leaders.
