The New Car

Thursday was a very interesting day. I was fighting the flu for the previous two days, of all things in the middle of summer! (I blame climate change ) Anyway, I woke up and decided that I should go to work regardless of my overall malaise, only to find that my bike was gone.

That’s right! Stolen from my carport! Generally it’s stored closer to the house, a little more out of sight. Of course, this time it was left a little more visible, and in our nice little neighborhood someone nicked it! That’s the bike out.

A little back story before the bike in portion: We recently moved in a great house across from a wooded park, close to our sons new day care, and within 2 miles of my work. An added benefit is that we had no excuse to have two cars. So we finally sold my rig (the less fuel efficient one). With that money I planned on upgrading my bike, paying down some of our debt and putting some money into savings.

Start Steady Staters Young, My Son's New Bike

So, as horrible as it is to have your bike stolen from you, it is just as fortunate that I have the money to finally get the bike of my dreams. I have been putting a lot of thought into what would fit me (tall guy) and my riding style (road, light touring). I went with the Surly Long Haul Trucker (photo above). It’s the first bike since I was my son’s age that actually fits me perfectly. I love it!

How does this relate to the steady state economy? Being a “steady stater” involves living within your ecological means without undermining the ability of future generations to live a similar life. Part of that is removing fossil fuels, a dirty, non-renewable resource that is destroying our planet, from your life. What better way than to bike instead of drive? Pick up a bike on craigslist or freecycle or a local bike shop and try to integrate biking to work a few times a week.

Related posts:

1. Bike to Work: Save The Planet
2. Support The US Bicycle Route System
3. Steady State Cyclist Tours Canada

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is resiliency, both personal and communal. It’s a main topic in the book of the month, The Transition Handbook, too. What is resilience? It is the ability of a system to absorb or adapt to external changes and shocks. Essentially, it’s the ability to roll with the punches. This seems to me to be an incredibly valuable trait to have as a strong, independent human being. More importantly, it’s something we should instill in our communities and the systems upon which we rely for sustaining and enriching our lives.

We seem to be talking a lot about climate change lately, yet we should be just as worried about peak oil. I am begining to think we should worry a bit more about it, actually. Oil is in everything. Either directly or indirectly, oil rules our lives and touches everything we rely on. So what happens when we run out? Well, it’s not as important as what happens after the peak. After we cross the point of less supply yet increasing demand.

After the peak prices go up, quickly. The rise in oil prices will result in a rise in food prices, clothing prices, transportation costs, and just about everything else. This wave of cost increases will make it very difficult for everyone who is not extremely rich, especially those of us in the middle class, and even more so for those near or just under the poverty level.

Watch this little video and think about how your community. Are you fostering resilience? Perhaps you should investigate the Transition Movement, too.

Oh, a site note: I am officially a licensed professional engineer. I passed my exams. Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Mr President, Put Solar On The White House
2. Post Growth Reading List

Lead By Example, Symbols Are Powerful

Symbols are important. The Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Great Wall are all examples of important cultural symbols. But even small symbols are important, in fact I would venture that smaller, local symbols are even more important on a day-to-day basis – the example of a father, the blessing of a ship, the courtesy of a door held open.

In order for the United States to survive the coming few decades as a society it will need to invest in something called resilience. This term has devoid from our lives for the past 50-100 years in part because of our belief that we will forever have cheap energy. The truth of the matter is that oil is peaking, and will run out soon.

Even before it runs out completely, it will get super expensive. This might not seem like a big deal to some, but to many this will increase the costs of everything we do, because nearly all of it relies on oil. Electricity, supermarket food, pencils, transportation, fresh water, lawn mowers, sewer, medical supplies, and waste water systems – everything either requires oil directly or indirectly.

Therefore, in order to increase our society’s resilience, we need to be able to take the shock of post-peak oil in stride. This means, among many other things, having readily available renewable energy. We should take advantage of our cheap(er) oil now to build the structures that will sustain a more resilient society after the peak. Once the shocks come it will likely be too late to make any proper transition to a renewable energy-powered society without hardship.

Back to symbols – we need a strong leader in this venture towards a sustainable society. President Obama has a great opportunity to provide a great symbol of our commitment on top of his house – for free! The Glõbama Campaign is provide a means for us to send a message to the president that he should do just that – put solar panels on the white house!

Check it out here.

Related posts:

1. Blueprint For A Better World
2. Resiliency & Peak Oil
3. Obama Announces Degrowth, Wins Republican Support

Whether you’re a twitter follower or not, I tend to put a lot of articles up on there. Something like 3-15 a day. Micro-blogging they call it. Most of my tweets run with a hashtag or two: #neweconomy, #postgrowth, #steadystate, et cetera. Once upon a time it was a place for me to store for later use articles I thought interesting. Today it is a way to further the message and gaining readers for this blog and Post Growth. One twitter follower asked me recently what blogs I follow. Well….

Below is a list of the blogs I am currently following that I think give a wide array of articles on topics related to a sustainable society, economy and way of life. This is a fairly long list, so I suggest you get yourself a feed reader and have the articles sent to you in one location – I love google reader for this – or follow me on twitter for updates on articles I find especially pertinent. I wanted to write out a short description of each one, but realized after I compiled them all in one place that task would have taken me forever, so I encourage you to check them out on your own:

Anyone have others to suggest? I always love to add new blogs to my reading list!

Related posts:

1. Sustainable Economics Blogs
2. Sustainable Scale
3. Add It Up

This semi-regular report includes things happening in our world, policies, articles and practices in-line with the steady state economy or transitioning to it, that are worth some time to read about -  the good news, the promising results. They are all exciting things happening I just don’t have time to post about each in-depth.

Here are some cool things happening in the world:

Peter Victor Lecture in Toronto

Related posts:

1. Points of Progress
2. Points of Progress
3. Points of Progress

Taxation is an interesting facet of our society. Economists view taxes as a disincentive in a free market, and rightly so. Taxes increase the price of a product or service, making it less desirable. Yet, when you think about what we tax in this country, it’s mostly things we desire more of – income, profits, sales, et cetera. This odd behavior should be questioned, even more so today when every budget (state, city, federal) seems to be facing seriously tenuous times.

I took the train down to Oregon this last weekend to see my sister graduate from college. While there I stayed with Rob Dietz, Executive Director of CASSE and a good friend of mine. He handed me a very modest looking magazine called Sockeye. I am sure I will be drawing material from this one issue for some time (check it out, amazing articles). For now I want to talk about tax shifting, as mentioned in the article by Alan Durning and Amy Chan, “Making Prices Tell The Truth: Shifting Taxes from Bads to Goods.” (pdf)

The Imbalance of the Free Market

Taxes have the power of acting as a means of balancing what are called “market inefficiencies,” things in the free market system that generate negative externalities. These are unwanted side effects that are not taken into account in a product, service or activity. A great example of this is any fossil fuel, let’s take Coal for instance.

Let’s imagine a coal power plant starts leeching mercury into a watershed and a city water planet down river takes it in (coal accounts for most of the mercury in our waterways). The coal power plant is not paying to filter this mercury out, nor is it paying for all the damage that could occur from the toxin leeching into the ecosystems. Because the producer does not pay for the negative externalities it is left out of the decision to pursue coal power.

If these externalities were eliminated by charging or compensating for them, then they could be factored into the decision making process. This is especially important as all too often these become costs placed upon the society instead of the producer (e.g. the city water plant in the above example has to filter out the mercury from its water source). If these prices were added into coal’s price they would eventually make coal production to costly to be worthwhile.

One of the best ways to internalize these negatives into our free market is to increase their expense with taxes to help offset costs like oil spill clean ups, health care or water treatment.

More Taxes, Less Cuts

Instead of cutting important, meaningful services like education, health care, welfare, police and fire departments we should be looking at new sources of income. No one is looking forward to more taxes, so this leads us to the need to consider something – I know when I say it, politicians everywhere will wince – out of the box. The conventional isn’t working, hasn’t worked and only seems to make things worse as we go forward into the future.

Here are some of the tax/income ideas that I think have great potential:

• Tax Pollution – We have the systems to monitor pollutants, so we should tax everything on a global warming potential basis. Carbon costs $1 per unit, so methane (which has a GWP of 12 times that of CO2) would cost $12 per unit.
• Toll Roads – If we want to be serious about transitioning to sustainable means of travel, we need to start tolling more roads here in the states. These funds should go directly into funding more transit, maintenance, et cetera and keeping state transit workers employed.
• Tax Gasoline/Propane/Diesel – Here I have the same sentiment as the last point. The “true cost” of gasoline, when you add in all the externalities that can be priced, is around $12 per gallon. Now, a $12 gallon of gasoline would take a while to work up too – but it shouldn’t be seen as ridiculous (Europeans pay over $7 per gallon), especially since it will get there eventually on its own. However, if we start now we gain a better reward and help fight climate change along the way.
• Tax Resource Extraction – If you harvest anything unsustainably, it should be taxed. This goes doubly so for non-renewable resources like oil, natural gas and coal.
• Tax Advertising – This is a blight on human psyches and generally accepted by most as a nuisance. Personally, I think we should ake São Paulo’s route and outlaw advertising in public spaces. All others should be taxed as the public nuisance they are!
• Tax Banks – Banking is screwed up. Private banks and their CEOs make exorbitant amounts of money doing something provides comparably little service to society. As the current state of economic affairs is a great example of, banking is actually more detrimental to society than we thought just a few years ago. We need a small percentage tax on all banking transactions. This “Robin Hood Tax” could raise billions to fund education, social services, climate mitigation and aid in eliminating poverty and hunger.
• Tax Corporations - If anyone is to blame for most of the worlds problems, I could surely name more large corporations than individual people. Why don’t we tax them when they get “too big to fail”?
• Fuel Efficiency “Feebates” – A feebate is a combination of fee and rebate, often proposed as a means to improve fuel efficiency in vehicles. It works rather simply: for every mpg below the average on a new car purchase you pay a fee. For every mpg above the average on a new car purchase you get a rebate. This creates an incentive for both consumer and manufacturer to purchase/make more fuel efficient vehicles, thereby increasing the average. A study done at UC Berkeley showed that a $70 per mpg feebate would increase fuel efficiency about 1 mpg per year.
• Tax the Rich – People making more than 20 times the average wage should be taxed on their income. They are promoting inequality, which have been linked to a range of social and economic problems. Take this a few steps further, increase the taxes the further away you get from the average national income and subsidize the income of those 20 times below the average. This is more Robin Hood than the bank tax even: it supports equality and actually lifts people out of poverty. Basically, this could be a feebate for wage equality.

That’s all I got for now, though I am sure we could come up with a few more ways to generate income. All of these taxes could be instituted in small levels, gradually increased as we deem appropriate, and eventually should lead to the elimination of taxes on median-level incomes, profits and sales. This levy on taxing the goods would help offset the trickle-down of price increases that would likely occur with instituting this new types of taxes. Plus, we get a double-whammy: income for our ailing budgets and discouraging bad behavior.

Related posts:

1. Externalities and Valuing Non-Market Goods
2. Ethical Banking Systems
3. Fair Distribution: Ending the Wealth Gap

A little humor is always refreshing in all the news of the ever expanding Gulf oil spill. I couldn’t resist posting this hilarious video Climate Progress pointed me towards. Enjoy.

Available to view on YouTube here.

Related posts:

1. The Earth Bleeds Out
2. Information Deformation
3. Four Years. Go.

I’ve been biking to work more and it got me thinking of bike touring – long distance traveling on a bike. I decided that I would make it a goal to do an extended bike tour next summer (the Seattle to Portland Classic plus three more days down the coast and back) to prepare me for the ultimate goal of a cross country bike trip.

No sooner did I start thinking of the practicality of this journey and deciding I should use it as an opportunity to promote the steady state economy, as well as hopefully pick up some sponsors (maybe a brewery or two?), than I get an email about Jordan’s cross-Canada journey promoting the steady state economy!

You can hear more about his trip at his blog, but I’ll be sure to talk about it along the way as well. What an truly exciting trip! This is taken directly from the press release: (links and emphasis added)

Riding a bike is all about balance.  The same is true of a world economy that can endure, one that is more than a series of bubbles-and-pops.  Jordan Poppenk will bring those two concepts together in a cross-Canada cycling tour to raise awareness about the concept of the steady state economy.

The world’s financial authorities are preparing to meet in Toronto to discuss how to get the global economy growing again. But Jordan Poppenk wants them to talk about how to stop the world economy from growing again, and he’s cycling across Canada to get their attention.

Poppenk is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto and an environmental journalist. He wants Canadians to know about new ideas emerging from the world’s economics departments, how they mesh with modern ecological challenges, and why it’s essential we rethink the current program of boosting GDP every year. He’s cycling 6,500 km to help get the idea out there.

A steady state economy aims for stable population and stable consumption of energy and materials at sustainable levels. Such an economy favors development (getting better) rather than growth (getting bigger).

“The steady state concept is about reaching some balance with what nature can provide, and within those limits, we can have a very vibrant, exciting and worthwhile economy,” says Peter Victor, an ecological economist at York University.  Dr. Victor’s model of the Canadian economy demonstrates how the nation can prosper with a steady state economy, as documented in his book, Managing Without Growth.

Poppenk adds, “Whether or not you believe in human-induced climate change, other signs of the severe strain on ecosystems from our already overwhelming economic activity are everywhere. Growth is not helping most people anyway; Canada’s economic output has doubled since 1982, but 80% of Canadians have seen no improvement in their inflation-adjusted incomes.”

Poppenk is teaming up with the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) to communicate how a steady state economy could be desirable and to spark discussion about transitioning from growth to sustainability. He departs from Vancouver today and he hopes to reach Halifax on September 1.

Information, updates and photographic materials are available on Poppenk’s blog: Steady State Cyclist.

Related posts:

1. The Steady State Economy Conference 2010
2. Steady State Economy: An Overview
3. Top Ten Steady State Posts of 2009