Externalities – P2P Foundation https://blog.p2pfoundation.net Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Thu, 23 Mar 2017 20:30:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 62076519 Book of the day: The Safe Operating Space Treaty https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-day-safe-operating-space-treaty/2017/03/23 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-day-safe-operating-space-treaty/2017/03/23#respond Thu, 23 Mar 2017 10:03:28 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=64451 Full title – The Safe Operating Space Treaty: A New Approach to Managing Our Use of the Earth System Editor(s): Paulo Magalhães, Will Steffen, Klaus Bosselmann, Alexandra Aragão, Viriato Soromenho-Marques Book description from the publisher’s site: It is clear that international law is not yet equipped to handle the “ecological goods and services” that exist... Continue reading

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Full title – The Safe Operating Space Treaty: A New Approach to Managing Our Use of the Earth System

Editor(s): Paulo Magalhães, Will Steffen, Klaus Bosselmann, Alexandra Aragão, Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Book description from the publisher’s site:

It is clear that international law is not yet equipped to handle the “ecological goods and services” that exist simultaneously within and outside of all states. The global commons have always been understood as geographical spaces that exist only outside the political borders of states. A vital good such as a stable climate exists both within and outside all states, and shows traditional legal approaches to be ecological nonsense. With the recent possibility of measuring and monitoring the state and functioning of the Earth System through the Planetary Boundaries framework, it is now possible to define a “Safe Operating Space of Humankind” corresponding to a biogeophysical state of Earth.

In this sense, the Common Home of Humanity is not a planet with 510 million square kilometres, but is a specific favourable state of the Earth System. Recent major scientific advances anticipate a legal paradigm shift that could overcome the disconnection between ecological realities and existing legal frameworks. If we recognize this qualitative and non-geographic space as a Common Natural Intangible Heritage of Humankind, all positive and negative “externalities” end up being included within a new maintenance system of the Common Home.

Extract available in PDF here
Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

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Seeing Wetiko: The Freest Marketplace Money Can Buy https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/seeing-wetiko-freest-marketplace-money-can-buy/2016/10/21 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/seeing-wetiko-freest-marketplace-money-can-buy/2016/10/21#respond Fri, 21 Oct 2016 10:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=60892 By Jeffrey Hollender: In his book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich provides an outstanding guide to many of the factors that prevent the possibility of a truly free market. He writes: Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion... Continue reading

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By Jeffrey Hollender: In his book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich provides an outstanding guide to many of the factors that prevent the possibility of a truly free market. He writes:

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules — rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form — the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike — at all levels of government and in all three branches—design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians — and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care.

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation], those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government — often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

Our “Unfree Market”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e. protective legislation) can be helpful. But most ‘unfreedoms’ can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90 percent of the soybeans and 80 percent of the corn planted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325 percent and for corn it has been 2,659 percent between 1994 and 2011. So through their monopolized control of seeds, they are driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market — admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

Social Inequity by Design

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937 percent between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2 percent over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves.

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19 percent since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41 percent from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50 percent below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes, “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of Wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by Wetikos to perpetuate Wetiko.

Thirteen Ways to Start Fixing the Problem

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority — in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life.

How do we move toward this goal? Here are thirteen ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

  1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100 percent publicly financed elections.
  1.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.
  1.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.
  1.  End all corporate financial subsidies.
  1.  End insider trading.
  1. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.
  1.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.
  1.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25 percent.
  1.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.
  1.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plans and build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.
  1.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.
  1.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.
  1.  Mandate that women make up 50 percent of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must reign in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world.

*An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.


Originally published at FastCompany. 

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here.

Photo by angermann

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Postcapitalism and the city https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/postcapitalism-and-the-city/2016/10/12 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/postcapitalism-and-the-city/2016/10/12#respond Wed, 12 Oct 2016 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=60623 Paul Mason delivered this Keynote at Barcelona Initiative for Technological Sovereignty CCCB, 7 October 2016: The idea of postcapitalism consists of two hypotheses, about the unique effects of information technology. First, that information technology is preventing the normal adaptation process, whereby capitalism—as a complex system—reacts to crisis, to the exhaustion of old business models, to... Continue reading

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Paul Mason delivered this Keynote at Barcelona Initiative for Technological Sovereignty


CCCB, 7 October 2016: The idea of postcapitalism consists of two hypotheses, about the unique effects of information technology.

First, that information technology is preventing the normal adaptation process, whereby capitalism—as a complex system—reacts to crisis, to the exhaustion of old business models, to the low profitability of old businesses and old sectors.

Second, that information technology makes utopian socialism possible.

More precisely: information technology makes possible a transition towards relative abundance, through the rapid cheapening of some things, the automation of work, and through highly intelligent utilisation of capacity—of things, raw materials, energy and human services.

In a short space of time I can only outline the basics—because for this audience—of radical, networked people in a self-proclaimed rebel city—I want to propose some rebel actions, achievable at city scale.

My argument is that information technology changes the economy in three ways.

First, it dissolves the price mechanism. The economist Paul Romer pointed out in 1990 that information goods—if they can be copied and pasted infinitely, and used simultaneously without wear and tear—must fall in price under market conditions to a value close to zero.

Whether you use marginalist economics or Marxism, the same holds true: the act of copying and pasting takes up energy, mass and some labour. But the amounts are so small that the production cost is negligible.

Of course—and Romer anticipated this—capitalism responds by inventing mechanisms that put a price on this zero-cost product. Monopolies, patents, WTO actions against countries that allow copyright theft, predatory practices common among big technology vendors.

But it means the essential market relationships are no longer organic. They have to be imposed each morning by lawyers and legislators.

This information effect on price is affecting the physical world not just the world of information goods. Just as the price of bandwidth and processing power has fallen exponentially over the past 30 years, so has the price of DNA sequencing, or the number of defects in an engineering process.

So information is having a dramatic downward impact on the cost of production of real things, and the same vortex of cheapening happens everywhere.

The second impact of information is to automate work faster than new work can be invented.

Around 47% of all jobs are susceptible to automation, say Frey and Osborne (2013). And information does more to transform work: it makes it modular, loosening the link between hours worked and wages; and it makes work possible to do outside the workplace—blurring the division between work and life.

So falling prices and the automation of work have a very disruptive impact on the normal process of adaptation.

The typical process of adaptation involves: while old processes are automated and jobs destroyed, new processes are innovated requiring high-skilled work. The products command high prices. Wages rise in the new sectors, allowing high value consumption. The whole thing meshes together into what Carlota Perez calls a new techno-economic paradigm.

It’s happened four times in the history of industrial capitalism: the industrial revolution itself, the 1850s, the Belle Epoque before 1914 and then the post-1945 boom.

Today it is not happening.

Automation is destroying high value jobs faster than it creates them; the zero price effect fights against the need to raise production costs; neoliberalism has suppressed workers’ ability to demand higher wages—and the falling cost of inputs also suppresses this.

Instead of high productivity we have low productivity plus what the anthropologist David Graeber calls millions of bullshit jobs—jobs that do not need to exist. Like the car wash, which in the space of a lifetime has changed from being typically a machine to typically five men with rags.

Capitalism’s response mechanisms—apart from the imposition of monopolies and monopoly pricing; are

a) to maximise capacity utilisation of low-skilled labour and of assets. So we get Uber, Deliveroo and AirBnB are effectively capacity utilisation businesses. Or:

b) to artificially inflate the price and profitability of labour inputs: so housing becomes the major thing wages are spent on—and healthcare and university education.

Things that in all previous eras of capitalism the elite desired to be as cheap as possible—to ease wage pressures—are now made as expensive as possible, and capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.

If we do not break this cycle, you can easily see capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism.

The growth engine is the central bank, pumping money into the system; and the state, propping up effectively insolvent banks. The typical entrepreneur is the migrant labour exploiter; the innovator someone who invents a way of extracting rent from low-wage people—like Uber or AirBnB.

Fortunately there is a third impact of info-tech. It has begun to create organisational and business models where collaboration is more important than price or value.

I hope everyone here understands the concept of externalities—for it is crucial. Networked business models create massive positive externalities—network effects –where the data, or the well-being, or the utility created by network interactions is capturable and exploitable.

But as soon as technology allowed it, we started to create organisations where the positive effects of networked collaboration were not captured by the market.

Wikipedia is the obvious example; or Linux; or increasingly the platform co-operatives where people are using networks and apps to fight back against the rent-seeking business models of firms like Uber and Airbnb.

But ask your tech people a more fundamental question: beneath the bonnet of our product, how much of what we use are tools commonly produced, outside the market sector, and maintained for free by a community of technicians? The answer is a lot.

In the 19th century the word for a strike was “taking tools out of the shop”. In the 20th century the management owned the tools. In the 21st century the tools are commonly owned, maintained and free.

The technology itself is in revolt against the monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and the private capture of externalities.

The postcapitalist project is simply: recognise the transition, its enormous potential, and promote it.

We must stop fantasising about a third industrial revolution, or a third capitalism based on immaterial wealth.

We must promote the transition to a non-capitalist form of economy which unleashes all the suppressed potential of information technology, for productivity, well.being and culture.

I don’t have a programme for this transition but a basic methodology: involving three sectors of the economy: the market, the state and the non-market—or collaborative sector—in which things are produced and consumed outside of monetary exchange; where the externalities are collectively owned.

The strategic aim is: to reduce the amount of work done to the minimum; to move as much as possible of human activity out of the market and state sectors into the collaborative sector; to produce more stuff for free.

My guess is this will take the best part of a century but there are some things we can do tomorrow to make it happen.

If the aim is for humanity to do as little work as possible, you can do it through three mechanisms. One is to automate. The other is to reduce the input costs to labour, so that we can survive on less wages and less work. The third is to push forward rapidly the de-linking of work and wages.

I have a strong hunch that the city is going to be the primary venue of change in this process. Cities have stopped eviscerating their centres; young, networked people want to live right in the centre—sometimes two or three to a room—because they understand the city is the closest the analog world comes to a network. The city is where the networked individual wants to live—at least for some of their life, and for some of their working year or week.

So what can a city do to promote the postcapitalist transition?

First—be overt. Help people to conceptualise the transition by actually talking about it. The renaissance happened in key cities because they set up institutions and a public discourse about the transition. The Rialto in Venice, as a market, was such a public institution; so was the round theatre in which Shakespeare dramatised a story from the Rialto; so was the Waag, in Amsterdam, where goods were weighed.

I would like to see Barcelona become a city where the ideas of co-operation, free stuff, non-privatisation and overt postcapitalism become part of the public discourse.

paul_mason_sep_2015

Next—switch off the great neoliberal privatisation machine.

We know what it’s there for—to hand public assets to the private sector so that the profits of decaying businesses are temporarily boosted—whether it by a prison contract, a smart city contract, a school maintenance contract.

Another way of understanding privatisation is to say: how can we do public services as expensively as possible?

You need to end it strategically. That does not mean the local state does everything—it has no expertise in engineering, in hi-tech, in transport infrastructure—and must trade with the market sector. But end the transfer.

The next proposal is more radical: model reality as a complex system.

Planning under socialism had a terrible reputation—the planned economy: nobody wants to return to that. But planning under neoliberal captalism is guesswork. We will look back at infrastructure planning in the late 20th century as negatively as we do on Stalinism’s 5 year plan.

We accept ludicrous cost-benefit proposals from engineers and architects for the big stuff we spend taxpayers money on. 50 years later, when the infrastructure fails to deliver the promised benefit, there is nobody around to care.

So we need accurate models. Behavioural, complex system models that we can ask radical questions of: like—what happens if no Barcelona City employee can claim expenses for an Uber ride? Or what happens if we mandate the use of the FairPhone, not the iPhone?

If the models says—radical solutions don’t work, and cause more trouble than progress, then you listen to the model.

But right now we have no way of conceptualising transition—and I would say to Barcelona it could, together with some other world cities, sponsor big tech, at scale, to model the urban economy and the measures needed to survive in a long transition.

Next—promote the basic income.

The basic income is an idea whose time is coming, because there won’t be enough work to go around. For me the basic income is a one-off subsidy for automation—to un-hook humanity from bullshit job creation and promote the delinking of work and wages.

However, it’s a transitional measure. It can only be paid for by the state taxing the market sector. As the market sector shrinks, that means you run out of taxes. So I never use the words “unconditional” or universal. I would make the basic income conditional on engagement with the demos of the city. For example, if you obliged peopel to take part in collective groups to manage the chronic diseases of poverty: mental illness, hypertension, stress, obesity; you could point to a payback from the basic income in terms of current spending.

Next—actively promote the collaborative sector over the market and the state. The building block is the co-op, the credit union, the NGO, the non-profit company, the peer-to-peer lender and the purely voluntary or social enterprise.

Most local enterprise models say they want high-tech businesses, but they often accept monopoly pricing or massive subsidies to entice monopoly tech businesses. OK fine. But if you only replaced the wasteful creation of low-skill, low wage businesses with a preference for businesses with some aspect of collaboration or sharing, you would spark a major change.

You have to understand the benefits of these entities are not completely measurable in GDP terms.

You have to promote new ways of measuring activity and progress.

A simple metric would be: how many hours work is performed for the state (for wages based on taxation); the market (wages paid out of business turnover, including inside a traditional co-op or NGO); and how much is provided not for wages at all?

Later on we can try and evolve metrics that capture complex social effects.

Finally, understand and fight the battle over the externalities. Whether it is in the roll-out of a smart city project; or public health data; or transport planning—the data produced by networks has value to the state, the market and the non-market.

I would not proceed from the absolute principle that “the state owns all the data”; or all public data should be held in common. But the state and eventually the commons should have first rights to all the data just the same as in a republic it owns all the land.

The state should ensure that network data remains anonymous—and that its collection is non-detrimental to the human rights of citizens. But then the exploitation of the data should be a matter for negotiation. If you need to incentivise the roll out of innovative new city-wide data technologies that could promote equality, cheapness and utility for all, maybe you make a deal over the data.

Ultimately, however, the greatest good comes from the common ownership and exploitation of data, because it establishes the principle that this vast new information resource—which is our collaborative behaviour captured as data—is part of the commons.

Suppose Barcelona did these things:

  • Brand itself as a city of commons and collaborative production
  • End privatisation
  • Massively reduce the cost of basic services like housing, transport, education and health so that being in the precariat became more survivable
  • Build an agent based, complex model of the economy, with real inputs, so that participatory democracy could model complex decisions
  • Prefer and promote collaborative organisations over both the centralised state and the market solutions
  • Institute a citizens basic income, conditional on some participation on non-profit activities
  • Decree that the networked data of the population as it uses public services is non-ownable.

Would capitalism collapse?

No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away—the rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.

But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who call it home.

All the other challenges would remain: the environmental challenge—not just low carbon but the preservation of quality living environments in a city sometimes deluged with visitors. Also the ageing challenge and the debt challenge.

The agenda I have outlined is not—and never can be—the sole ownership of the radical left. I think it can provide a common platform for the left, for social democracy and for liberal capitalism.

I think people like me on the radical left were among the first to start talking about it because the elite of neoliberalism is so bereft of imagination: this is the first elite in capitalist history that reacted to a crisis by doubling down on the model that does not work.

I don’t think the postcapitalist era will be scarred by competitive empires, as early capitalism was. You will know that Genoa came first, to be followed by Amsterdam to be followed by London.

Right now, in the world, there are hundreds of towns in friendly competition to become transition towns—achieving as close as possible zero carbon footprints and radically changing energy use.

I could be completely wrong. But if I am right, it makes sense for all cities to ask themselves: could we become the first city to begin a demonstrable and tangible transition away from neoliberal capitalism, towards a society of high equality, high well-being, high collaboration?

If you really don’t like the word postcapitalist use something else—like the collaborative city, the city of participatory democracy, the networked city. Or the human city. But do it.


Republished from Medium with the author’s permission.

Image of Paul Mason: DTRocks [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Global Private Investment in Green Tech Totals $7.13 Trillion https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/global-private-investment-green-tech-totals-7-13-trillion/2016/05/23 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/global-private-investment-green-tech-totals-7-13-trillion/2016/05/23#respond Mon, 23 May 2016 07:30:24 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=56317 The Renewable Energy sector is growing strongly as fossil fuel becomes less appealing in light of cost parity of renewables, limiting carbon emissions and driving evolution to sustainable societies. In Energy Efficiency, widespread ripple effects positively impact jobs creation, manufacturing and other metrics tracked by traditional GDP and integral to transition management. The following text... Continue reading

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The Renewable Energy sector is growing strongly as fossil fuel becomes less appealing in light of cost parity of renewables, limiting carbon emissions and driving evolution to sustainable societies. In Energy Efficiency, widespread ripple effects positively impact jobs creation, manufacturing and other metrics tracked by traditional GDP and integral to transition management.

The following text was sent to us by noted author and futurist Hazel Henderson to highlight the release of Ethical Market’s new Green Transition Scoreboard report, which you will also find embedded at the end of this blog post.

After decades of pursuing my life’s work helping guide Mother Earth from the Fossil Fuel Age to the Solar Age, efforts of colleagues and RSA Fellows like myself such as Chris Oestereich, Chandran Nair, Michel Bauwens and other pioneers, are driving the necessary change. On Earth Day, the United Nations held a signing ceremony for the UN Paris Agreement, with signatories pledging to finance and implement programs to limit climate change, aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On the same day, Ethical Markets Media released its Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS). As of Q4 2015, the GTS totals $7.13 TRILLION cumulative in non-government investments and commitments tracked since 2007 in the global green transition now underway. As president and founder of Ethical Markets, I wrote the detailed overview of the 2016 report, “Ending Externalities: Full-Spectrum Accounting Clarifies Transition Management”, focusing on the top priority: eliminating “externalities” which the IMF estimates at $5.3 trillion annually worldwide and drawing from the work of Chandran and many others. Companies tracked since 2007 by the GTS are those avoiding negative externalities and focusing on transition management to low-carbon economies agreed on at COP21 in Paris, 2015.

The GTS covers substantial capital investment in areas which my years of research as a science advisor and which the Ethical Markets Advisory Board expertise, including Michel’s, indicate are strongly contributing to the growing green economy. The GTS tracks Renewable Energy, Energy Efficiency, Life Systems, Green Construction and Corporate Green R&D. Fintech for sustainability, a new subsector, includes peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, in addition to subsectors tracking the system-wide interconnections among information and digitization, water, food, education and health.

Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil), Certified B Corporation, is a micro-multinational social enterprise with the mission of reforming markets and metrics while helping accelerate and track the transition to the green economy worldwide. We strictly define ‘green’ by omitting technologies such as nuclear, clean coal and most biofuels while carefully assessing rapidly advancing technologies such as nanotech and IoT (Internet of Things). Sources of financial data are screened by rigorous social, environment and ethical auditing standards.

The upward trend in investments since 2007 aligns with our recommendation to invest at least 10% of institutional portfolios directly in companies driving the global Green Transition. Updating strategic asset allocation models serves both as opportunities and as risk mitigation.

The Renewable Energy sector is growing strongly as fossil fuel becomes less appealing in light of cost parity of renewables, limiting carbon emissions and driving evolution to sustainable societies. In Energy Efficiency, widespread ripple effects positively impact jobs creation, manufacturing and other metrics tracked by traditional GDP and integral to transition management. Life Systems encompasses broad areas systemically linked, including water, remediation, waste and recycling, green infrastructure and info-structure, community investing and education, investments often overlooked as too small. Green Construction ranges from “low-tech” passive solar buildings to “high-tech” flow 3D printing. For consistency, we omit labor, thus undercounting a form of capital which intrinsically increases the value of green construction. Corporate Green R&D is powered by the automotive industry and also heavily weighted in favor of energy generation, conservation and distribution with a precipitous decline in fossil fuels P&E.

We track nearly a $1 trillion invested in the green transition every year! With great hope and pride, I’m pleased to spread the good news that the Solar Age is here.

Ending Externalities: Full-Spectrum Accounting Clarifies Transition Management by P2P Foundation

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