Category: Uncategorized

Fossil Energy Capital Gains Tax

A special capital gains tax that is applied only to the sale of equities (shares of a company’s stock) of companies in the fossil fuel energy sector.

This tax is an incentive for investors to divest from oil, coal and gas energy companies, as it will make these investments less profitable to these investors. The divestment of funds from these companies speeds the transition of the energy sector toward wind, solar and tidal energy sources. The proceeds from the fossil energy capital gains tax can be used to invest in the infrastructure necessary for this transition.

This special capital gain tax is a device designed after the principle that it is wrong for investors to profit from the destruction of the atmosphere.

A window of time before the start date of this special capital gains tax would allow the current holders of these stocks to divest without penalty.

 

Leaf blower

1) A gasoline-powered rake.

2) A device that lifts pollutants such as lead into the air where they are inhaled by sapiens and other animals.

3) A device used to remove a source of fertility (leaves) from the soil and plants below.

The leaf blower, with its cost and high energy use, shows the extent to which the practice and principle of thrift, so important to humans in prior ages, was abandoned as both a practice and a value. However, the greatest example of the abandonment of thrift may be the daily use of single use plastics (such as plastic grocery bags or take-out food containers).

Choices

What can you do? Here are some choices that are available to you.

1) Share this definition, and these ideas, with others.

2) Use a rake or let the leaves stay where they are so they can fertilize the soil, guard the plants below them from frost and support important microorganisms.

Deforestation

1) A rapid decline in the planet’s oxygen production capacity and the destruction of both ecosystems and the species that inhabit them; the removal of a major component of the planet’s living systems.

2) A type of habitat destruction that results in a decrease in the species diversity.

3) A common practice of the industrial agriculture system and one fostered by a) the limited liability protections given to corporations and b) the logic of financial statements, which is indifferent to losses born by others.

See the speed at which deforestation can occur with current technology.

Deforestation leads to oxygen loss
TheNewLanguage.Org

Biodynamic Farmer

1) A steward of the land; an environmentalist.

2) A student of the workings and interactions in an ecosystem and its insects, plants, animals and microorganisms; a person who shapes their behaviors to complement—as opposed to fight against or destroy—the workings of a habitat and ecosystem.

3) A person who understands the interactions between the microorganisms in the soil and the plants that grow in it—and understands the impact of his or her actions on the ecosystem.

4) A person dedicated to the health and vitality of the soil and the microorganism and bacteria found in it and which together contributes to the soils ability to grow food.

5) A person who understands how to improve the fertility of the soil without the application of factory fertilizers; a steward of the planet’s soil; a person who understands that soil fertility and quality is important for sustaining life on the planet.

6) A person who sees the insects, microorganisms, grazers as all complementing his efforts to grow food; a person who sees these things as being necessary to a habit.

This understanding stands in contrast to the views and practices of industrial-scale growers and conventional industrial agribusinesses who do not wish to complement and cooperate with existing systems and species on land being used to grow food and do not see soil as possessing a web of insects and microorganisms that allow plants to absorb nutrients. Industrial-scale growers—and the practices they employ—are the enemies of habits and the species who occupy them.

Practices of biodynamic farmers include crop diversification, the minimization of soil inputs obtained outside the farm, the fostering of species biodiversity, the growing of perennials, the use of cover crops and nitrogen fixing crops, growing crops appropriate to the existing soil conditions and climate, and the avoidance of monocultures and pesticides, herbicides or other factory soil amendments.

Limited Liability

1) Limited liability is a guarantee of regularly occurring manmade disasters (such the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico or the methane gas containment breach in Southern California) as well as systematic destruction of ecosystems (for example, deforestation, pollution of rivers and oceans from industrial farming, pollution of the atmosphere). It is a way to assign the costs of damage caused by the company to the public.

2) It is a legal protection that allow companies evade responsibility for environmental destruction and encourages companies to assign a value of zero to ecosystems and all elements of the biosphere (such as the atmosphere or any publicly owned lands) not owned by the company.

3) A scheme by which companies can avoid bearing full responsibility for its actions. Because a company can avoid responsibility for damaged caused by an oil spill or the pollution of an underground aquifer, for example, companies have a very strong incentive to take extreme risks.

4) A way for companies to shift the burden of a risk from the company to the public. It is one of the many devices companies uses to push costs for harms it causes away from the company.

Limited liability is a way to shift the burden and cost of a catastrophe away from the company responsible for it and away from that company’s shareholders and place that burden on those costs on ecosystems and the people and other living things that inhabit them.

Limited liability laws were passed before it was possible for a company to cause an earthquake (by pumping wastewater from fracking into the ground) or manufacture a chemical that could kill microorganisms in the soil and cause birth defects in a variety of species—and before chemical plants were so large that a fire could destroy miles of land in the vicinity. The notion of limited liability was conceived when the scale of a mishap was relatively small and when massive man-made environmental catastrophes were unheard of.

Belief-induced Blindness

1) The inability to perceive sights and sounds and phenomena that contradicts existing beliefs or the inability to receive information that conflicts with those same beliefs.

2) A person unaware of the process in which beliefs are shaped (or how error prone and indifferent to reality this process is) and so invests more his or her beliefs than in any type of evidence.

Permanence

Permanence is a fiction invented by homo sapiens and also an illusion believed by them. The idea is incompatible with the laws of biology and no organism is in possession of it.

The fiction or invented reality of permanence is paired with the notion of the self to give individual homo sapiens the illusion of continuity of and preservation of themselves through time (i.e., a soul). The soul is one fiction that convinces sapiens that they are apart from and superior to the other organisms on the planet.

The invented reality of permanence is also necessary to accept the idea of the progress and advancement of societies toward an ideal state and to accept the notion of continuous economic growth—ideas which often serve as justifications for actions and behaviors which destroy ecosystems and habitats.

Invented Reality

An invented reality is an idea or thing that exists only in the imaginations of human beings and has no reality outside of it. By existing in the imaginations of human beings and being believed by them, an invented reality can produce the conditions necessary for mass cooperation between humans, a level of cooperation that would not otherwise be possible.

Invented realities do not exist in the biological realm—that is, they have no biological reality—but invented realities can produce behaviors in human beings that are destructive to ecosystems or are complicit in this destruction. Markets are one example. Markets do not exist in the biological sphere but it is due to markets that human being ignore the function of certain things within ecosystems and see them only in terms of a fluctuation price given to them by the markets.

Here is a video about invented realities and how we use them for mass cooperation.