Post by MagnetMan on Mar 14, 2010 17:17:23 GMT -5
CHAPTER 1
The Next Industrial Revolution
The Next Industrial Revolution Emerging possibilities -- A new type of industrialism -- The loss of living systems -- Valuing natural capital -- The industrial mind-set -- The emerging pattern of scarcity -- Four strategies of natural capitalism -- Radical resource productivity -- Putting the couch potato of industrialism on a diet -- An economy of steady service and flow -- Restoring the basis of life and commerce
Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development. What might be called "industrial capitalism" does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs, the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.
But this deficiency in business operations cannot be corrected simply by assigning monetary values to natural capital, for three reasons. First, many of the services we receive from living systems have no known substitutes at any price; for example, oxygen production by green plants. This was demonstrated memorably in 1991-93 when the scientists operating the $200 million Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona discovered that it was unable to maintain life-supporting oxygen levels for the eight people living inside. Biosphere 1, a.k.a. Planet Earth, performs this task daily at no charge for 6 billion people.
Second, valuing natural capital is a difficult and imprecise exercise at best. Nonetheless, several recent assessments have estimated that biological services flowing directly into society from the stock of natural capital are worth at least $36 trillion annually. That figure is close to the annual gross world product of approximately $39 trillion--a striking measure of the value of natural capital to the economy. If natural capital stocks [“Natural resources”] were given a monetary value, assuming the assets yielded "interest" of $36 trillion annually, the world's natural capital would be valued at somewhere between $400 and $500 trillion--tens of thousands of dollars for every person on the planet. That is undoubtedly a conservative figure given the fact that anything we can't live without and can't replace at any price could be said to have an infinite value.
Additionally, just as technology cannot replace the planet's life-support systems, so, too, are machines unable to provide a substitute for human intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, organizational abilities, and culture. The World Bank's 1995 Wealth Index found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all the financial and manufactured capital reflected on global balance sheets. This, too, appears to be a conservative estimate, since it counts only the market value of human employment, not uncompensated effort or cultural resources.
Read the whole chapter:(CTRL-click link) Natural Capitalism
www.natcap.org/images/other/NCchapter1.pdf
The Next Industrial Revolution
The Next Industrial Revolution Emerging possibilities -- A new type of industrialism -- The loss of living systems -- Valuing natural capital -- The industrial mind-set -- The emerging pattern of scarcity -- Four strategies of natural capitalism -- Radical resource productivity -- Putting the couch potato of industrialism on a diet -- An economy of steady service and flow -- Restoring the basis of life and commerce
Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development. What might be called "industrial capitalism" does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs, the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.
But this deficiency in business operations cannot be corrected simply by assigning monetary values to natural capital, for three reasons. First, many of the services we receive from living systems have no known substitutes at any price; for example, oxygen production by green plants. This was demonstrated memorably in 1991-93 when the scientists operating the $200 million Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona discovered that it was unable to maintain life-supporting oxygen levels for the eight people living inside. Biosphere 1, a.k.a. Planet Earth, performs this task daily at no charge for 6 billion people.
Second, valuing natural capital is a difficult and imprecise exercise at best. Nonetheless, several recent assessments have estimated that biological services flowing directly into society from the stock of natural capital are worth at least $36 trillion annually. That figure is close to the annual gross world product of approximately $39 trillion--a striking measure of the value of natural capital to the economy. If natural capital stocks [“Natural resources”] were given a monetary value, assuming the assets yielded "interest" of $36 trillion annually, the world's natural capital would be valued at somewhere between $400 and $500 trillion--tens of thousands of dollars for every person on the planet. That is undoubtedly a conservative figure given the fact that anything we can't live without and can't replace at any price could be said to have an infinite value.
Additionally, just as technology cannot replace the planet's life-support systems, so, too, are machines unable to provide a substitute for human intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, organizational abilities, and culture. The World Bank's 1995 Wealth Index found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all the financial and manufactured capital reflected on global balance sheets. This, too, appears to be a conservative estimate, since it counts only the market value of human employment, not uncompensated effort or cultural resources.
Read the whole chapter:(CTRL-click link) Natural Capitalism
www.natcap.org/images/other/NCchapter1.pdf
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