The failures of the environmental community have been
(a) giving up on a “no regrets” strategy that concentrates on all the things the majority can agree on whether or not they believe in “global warming”
(b) concentrating on legislative and regulatory action to the exclusion of grassroots empowerment through practical demonstrations of individual and community solutions
(c) not building a united front of organizations all pushing in the same direction at the same time and actually executing a common strategy long-term through a battery of complementary tactics short-term (the environmental community is notorious for not knowing the difference between strategy and tactics)
(d) motivating almost exclusively by fear and thereby building learned helplessness and despair rather than fostering individual and community competence
(e) focusing almost totally on a problem orientation rather than a solutions orientation
We tax sales at the state level, yet we haven’t taxed real estate sales statewide. It’s only fair that we tax purchases of the rich as well as purchases of the poor, if we are to tax purchases at all.
Together we, the people of Massachusetts, have made our home state a nice place. So most people moving or living here really want to buy land here. ‘Location, location, location’ they say, controls real estate value. That location is in relation to the rest of us, and in relation to the communities we’ve built together. It is that location that gives most market value to land, and it is that location which our communities made valuable in the first place. Returning a portion of the market value we created through our communities to maintain our communities makes sense. A state tax on land purchases would return a portion of the value we created as we built these fine communities.
Where are we going, why, and for what? This, in re-designing transport systems, while seeming frivolous, actually gets to the heart of the matter: The opportunities for our region in understanding and re-devising transport are enormous. We can spend less time in traffic, less money on fuel, insurance, repair, etc. and spend less of our lives suffering from car accidents, asthma, bronchitis, etc. Additionally, with less of our earnings leaving the region for fuel and car expenditures, we’ll have more to spend on each other.
When public transportation expands, many gain, but few gain more or more directly than the landowners near new stops. Reportedly the land value increase yielded to them is often about the same as the cost of the expansion. One way to afford such public transport expansion is taxing those of us who stand to gain the most; the land-owners near new subway stations and facilities, as reported on here.
It’s good to see more and more people bicycling.. Bicycling is very energy-efficient transport, the exercise promotes physical health, and it leaves the nation less reliant on imports, while polluting much less as well.
Outer space, where there is not air enough to breath, is closer to us on earth than Dorchester is to Medford. With only about 7.5 miles of air above us, and 400 ppm of CO2 now in our air, there is no longer airspace above earth for all the carbon in the fuels we could burn. We need to encourage each other to burn less, in order to maintain the climate, the agricultural systems and thus the food we all rely on. Nothing says ‘Slow down’ like taxes. A carbon tax will encourage all of us to develop the methods and the equipment all the world will need tomorrow, for our food system to continue to yield our meals.
Those before us, to eliminate scarce labor, substituted plentiful energy resource use via technology, which was brilliant in a world empty of people and full of resources,, but now we’re running out of resources and have plenty of labor. We can now afford, in creating new methods and technology, to use more labor and less rare resources, which will yield less pollution and more jobs. Resource taxes like carbon taxes inspire this needed change in technology to proceed faster.
With the current five plus percent sales tax applied to real estate sales, and a carbon tax inspiring development of lasting infrastructure, we can assure each of us, when young, of a fair chance at life, and when old, of the help we all deserve. We can build the strength of our bridges and our schools. We can insure each of us access to the jobs we need to survive, and we can aid and guide those building the businesses that address the challenges before us.
Continue reading On Increasing Mass. RevenuesReversing Global Warming while Meeting Human Needs: An Urgently Needed Land-Based Option
Friday, January 25, 2013
2:00 – 4:00 PM, ASEAN Auditorium
The Fletcher School, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford, MA
Reception to follow
RSVP at http://allansavory.eventbrite.comAllan Savory, Rancher and Restoration Ecologist, Founder of the Savory Institute and originator of the Holistic Management approach to restoring grasslands, winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, and finalist in the Virgin Earth Challenge
Presented by CIERP’s Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity Program with the Friedman School’s Agriculture, Food, and Environment Program and Planet-TECH AssociatesFree and open to the public. Convened by the Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity Program of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher;
the Agriculture, Food, and Environment Program of Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy; and Planet-TECH Associates.First in a Series of “Creating the Future We Want” Events.
While governments posture and dither, a pragmatic practitioner and intellectual entrepreneur, Allan Savory,has been developing and demonstrating a powerful technique that can reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere immediately while reversing desertification and providing livelihoods and food for millions of people. His applied research based in Zimbabwe on the restoration of grasslands has now been replicated on millions of acres worldwide. The application of his methods has the potential to significantly reduce atmospheric carbon through an increase in plant growth and soil formation. This process begins immediately and involves no new technologies, only a shift to the Holistic Management practices for livestock that he has pioneered. Major organizations and institutions are now recognizing his work, but climate scientists and governments have yet to incorporate it into their analyses and policy prescriptions.
Continue reading Reversing Global Warming while Meeting Human Needs
BY ROBINSON JEFFERS, 1938
Then what is the answer?-Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history…for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
{ via The Dark Mountain Project }
Continue reading The AnswerNick Thielker of Egremont sent the following letter to the Berkshire Eagle, which was published by that newspaper on election day – Nov 6, 2012.
It establishes the global and local imperative for change pretty well, I think, as local Greens in the Berkshires mobilize to grow politically larger and stronger.
Continue reading Voting For Green Change in Egremonthttp://techpresident.com/news/…
A group of people from the Occupy Wall Street movement is collaborating with the climate change advocacy group 350.org and a new online toolkit for disaster recovery, recovers.org, to organize a grassroots relief effort in New York City.
Occupy Sandy: http://occupywallst.org/articl…
Boston TEDX talk by Recovers.org http://www.ted.com/talks/caitr…
The combination of the jobs and economic focus of Occupy with the climate change and energy transition ideas of 350.org along with the disaster recovery systems of Recovers.org is a model that can build resilience and preparedness quickly if continued. Add Solar IS Civil Defense, set the Maker Culture loose, and it just might shade over into Solar Swadeshi, Gandhian economics, a non-violent and restorative open source peer-to-peer economic system where we plan for 100% success for all humanity, to paraphrase R Buckminster Fuller.
Continue reading Occupy SandyJohn Robb is a strategist and theorist of modern warfare. His book, Brave New War, is the best introduction I know of to small group warfare, the way technology has enabled ad hoc groups like Al Quaeda and others to wage war against superpowers like the USA.
In the last few years, Robb has changed his focus to the concept of resilience. Looking at the failure of international, national, and regional governmental, economic, and social systems to confront the challenges of climate change and institutionalized as well as ad hoc criminality, he has started an initiative to relocalize our basic systems of survival as we watch the slow decline and collapse of the overarching social machinery that currently exists.
The solution is to build resilience, is to build resilience at the local level… You take control of the things you can have influence over, the things in front of you, the things that are human scale…. and strangely, when you start looking at building resilience, building local viable communities, it solves all the problems at the global level, economically, environmentally, and in terms of quality of life…
Here is his lecture at the recent NYC Maker Faire. The video starts about 8 minutes in and his description of a resilient community ends around 15:40 when he begins to take questions. These seven or eight minutes are a useful introduction to a reasonable way forward.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/g…
Continue reading Building Resilient Communities: John Robb at the NYC Maker FaireYou can now estimate with great detail the solar electric potential of any roof in Cambridge, MA by just typing in an address on a webpage, the Cambridge Solar Tool
(http://cambridgema.gov/solar). For instance, the double triple decker in which I live has six apartments and a total roof area of 2,781 square feet. 1,136 of those sq ft have high PV (photovoltaic) potential. This could support an 18kW solar electric system providing 22,945 kWh per year, enough to power about a third of the electricity used by those six apartments, if each apartment uses the rough US average of around 11,000 kWh per year (my own annual electric use is around 1,600 kWh/yr).
The estimated savings per year for such a PV system are $9,081. The total cost is $101,720. With the Federal tax credit of $30,516 and a MA state tax credit of $1,000, the final cost to the owner would be $70,204. In addition, the Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) of 27¢/kWh could produce $6,212 per year (at least that’s my reading of the MA SREC program, but I could be wrong). Such an investment would pay for itself in about 8 years with a return on investment (ROI) of 12.93%, a better return than gold (10.19%) or the stock market (Dow Jones average: 5.50%). The solar electricity would replace other fuels that now spew 12 tons per year of carbon into the atmosphere.
If the owner did not want to put any money down, they could opt for a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), buying electricity from a third party which owns, installs, maintains, insures, and monitors a PV system on the roof of our double triple decker at a long term, generally 20 years, fixed and lower cost than what is paid now for power.
Continue reading The Cambridge, MA Solar ToolMassDOT (Dept of Transportation) is holding 15 public meetings around the Commonwealth. One of them was held on October 4, 2012 in Pittsfield,which I attended and followed up with written testimony which is presented below.
Andy McKeever of iBerkshires gave a very good report the next day.
While my fellow Berkshire Regional Transit Authority board members were testifying strongly about the unmet needs and the unfair funding mechanisms that create injustice and inequality I couldn’t help but take a brief moment to tweet with my smart phone how proud I was to be serving the community with them.
My own testimony was sent via e-mail on October 5, 2012, after having listened to my fellow board members and public the night before.
There are clear and compelling economic justice, economic development, and environmental reasons to invest our tax dollars into quality public transportation, even in the Berkshires.
My testimony follows. I encourage others from the Berkshires to submit their own testimony on our transportation infrastructure needs and to share it with me.
Continue reading Mass DOT TestimonyEver since the selection of 2000, the rudiments of US democracy have been under attack. We still haven’t dealt with the multitudinous problems of electronic voting machines and now we have a concerted attack on registration and voting by the Republican Party and their affiliated organizations. Those who have built the engines for stealing elections, from registration to vote counts, will use them, this year and every Election Day from this time forward, if they can.
Here are some resources to stop them in their tracks and rebuild our ability to vote for every single citizen. It is not an exhaustive list but it is a start.
Protect your own vote and those of all your fellow citizens.
Continue reading Combatting Election Theft: Some Resources