Transcript Perspectives on Green Business

Designing the Green Economy:
Beyond Scarcity, Toward
Abundance
Brian Milani
GreenEconomics.net
Liefhebber Consortium of Green Development
and Bad Dutch Football
The Green Economy
• A Historical Transition:
…from Quantity to Quality
• A Question of Potentials
…not simply limits
• Key to Sustainability:
Redefining Wealth
Redefining Wealth I
Quantitative:
Money & Material
Accumulation
Qualitative:
Well-being
Regeneration
Redefining Non-Material Wealth II:
Phantom/Casino vs. Real Economy
Casino (debt-based)
economy
Eco-service economy
Design Dimensions
• Political / Financial: trade, money /
currency, EPR / property /service
• Energy: soft energy path
• Technological: cradle-to-cradle, ecoindustrialism, Carbo Economy, shearing
layers, product design
• Spatial: urban design / green cities,
localization
Principles of a Green Economy
1.
The Primacy of Human Need, Service, Use-value,
Intrinsic Value & Quality
2. Following Natural Flows
3. Waste Equals Food
4. Elegance and Multifunctionality
5. Appropriate Scale / Linked Scale
6. Diversity
7. Self-Reliance, Self-Organization, Self-Design
8. Participation & Direct Democracy
9. Human Creativity and Development
10. The Strategic role of the Built-environment, the
Landscape & Spatial Design
The Green Economy:
Human & Eco Dimensions
1. “The Service Economy”
End-use: “Hot Showers and Cold Beer”
Nutrition, Illumination, Entertainment, Access,
Shelter, Community, etc.
2. The Economy in Loops —
The “Lake Economy”
Flowing with nature, Every output an input, Closed-loop
organization, Let nature do the work
Common Sense Economics
Increase restrictions on the flow
of material goods and physical
capital (to minimize transport
costs, etc.)
Lessen restrictions on the flow of
information and culture.
Herman Daly
“Trade Recipes,
not Cookies.”
note:
Globalization does exactly the
opposite: via free trade and
intellectual property law.
Creativity: the key to Real
development
• meet real needs:
– Don’t use material consumption as a substitute for
qualitative fulfillment
– Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization
• Greening: substitute human creativity for
energy and resources.
--People-intensive development
--Resource productivity
Mass Collaboration
• beats competition
every time
• wikinomics: based in
abundance not
scarcity
• undermines industrial
markets
Labour & Resource Relationship
• Industrial economy:
resource-intensive.
labour productivity:
Substitutes resources
for labour.
• Green Economy:
people-intensive /
resource-saving.
Substitutes human
creativity for resources
Industrialism: The Divided Economy
Invisible
Use-value
“Consumption”
People
Unpaid
Women
Informal
Private
Visible
Exchange-value
“Production”
Things
Paid
Men
Formal
Public
2
Invisible Economy (1)
Total Productive System of an Industrial Society
(layer cake with icing)
GNP-Monetized
½ of Cake
Top two layers
GNP “Private” Sector
“Private” Sector
“Public”Sector
“underground economy
Non-Monetized
Productive ½ of
Cake
Lower two layers
All rights reserved.
“Love Economy”
Mother Nature
Rests on
GNP “Public” Sector
Rests on
Social Cooperative
Love Economy
Rests on
Nature’s Layer
Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson
Invisible Economy (2)
The Economy in Loops
The Old Order: Materialism and
Industrialism
markets best suited to material
stuff
steel & autos; not culture and
quality of life
Crisis: overproduction and
"effective demand"
“Invisible Hand" doesn't work so
well in cultural production
post-Depression: Waste as
economic driver.
Scarcity, Class Power & Waste
• War production, suburbanization and
effective demand.
• Waste of resources
• Waste of human potential
The Post WW II Waste Economy
Permanent War
Economy
The Suburb
Economy:
Oil / Autos /
Subdivisions
“The greatest misallocation of resources in
human history.”
…James Howard Kunstler
Fordism & the Reinforcement of
Industrial Wealth
Matter
Money
Waste
Debt
Fordism
Keynesianism
Suburbanization/
Consumer Economy
War Industry
Paper Economy
Planned Inflation
New forms of creditmoney
1970s: End of the Line for the
Fordist Waste Solution
• saturation of markets
• social & environmental costs coming due:
fiscal crisis of the state
• limits to inflationary strategy
• Vietnam war, decline of the dollar,
German/Japanese competition
• OPEC & the energy crisis
– Petrodollars & Currency Crisis
Post-Fordist Casino Economy
• cost of waste come due: need for new
sources of “effective demand”
• new technologies & Megabyte Money:
money disconnected from Real economy
• financial sector: 30-50 times (?) larger than
the material economy
• Culture of Speculation: Stomp the weak /
Get rich quick
• Empty wealth creation: de facto
redistribution of wealth.
• Polarization of work and society
– end of social contracts: attack on Welfare State
– the growing gap between rich and poor
The Global Casino: Hijacking the
Information Revolution
• expansion of employment in
speculative industry
– Wall St.: more advanced technologically
than the military.
• Bubble Economies: last ‘frontiers’ for
capitalist growth.
-stock crash of 1987
-tech stock bubble of late 90s
-housing bubble of 2001-07
• Housing speculation: most destructive
& exploitative of the poor & average
people.
Crisis, Waste & the
Suppression of Human Potential
Creating Scarcity since
WWII:
• Waste production
• Debt & funny-money creation
• Austerity
The Economy & Culture of Fear
• Mainstream politics and media
today are mobilized for the
creation of fear, based in both
scarcity and personal insecurity.
• Reality TV competitions, extreme
fighting, Tea Parties, racist
fundamentalism, cultural
scapegoating, etc.
• Question: should we be careful
of adding more fear, however
justifiable? (climate change,
etc.)
Strategies for Abundance
• Invest in social and natural
regeneration
 infrastructure & public goods
• Material Economic Security:
 meet everyone’s needs
• Disable the Coercive power of
Money
 Community Currencies
 Basic Income guarantees
• Free Culture: from ownership to
access; from belongings to
belonging
Invest in Social and Natural
Regeneration
(includes growing categories of “public
goods” and social/eco infrastructure)
• increased role for government on all
levels
• invest in community: the nexus for
regenerative development
• eliminate externalities: make
polluters, extractors, incarcerators
pay
Property & Stewardship
• Ownership should be relative: designed to
support stewardship and human
development
– property: good for earlier materialistic
development.
• Centralized ownership: EPR
• Small-holder stewardship: good for land
A New Paradigm of Security
Geared as much to unleashing
individual and community
creativity as protecting the
vulnerable.
Eliminates fear on many levels.
Deflates the coercive power
of money—allows ethical
values to factor into personal
economic decisions.
Supports imagination &
innovation that transforms
other sectors: e.g.
community business.
Meet everyone’s basic
needs...or else!
Ending the Coercive Power of
Money
Community Currencies
• especially account-money
systems
Basic Income Guarantees
• the more universal, the better
the appropriate goal:
Gift Circulation
• Money as information &
energy
• Brand: “Information wants to
be free.”
• Requires social / eco value
to be embedded in everyday
life : indicators
• Question: transitional
mechanisms