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Strategy: Create a most-sustainable-nation tariff.
No program of green fees to integrate prices and real costs in the U.S. marketplace will be effective if companies can circumvent those fees by bringing in products from overseas. Conversely, if U.S. companies absorb environmental costs, they should not be at a competitive disadvantage with overseas companies that do not. As a result, we should reverse the thrust of current trade policies and propose a new tariff status called most sustainable nation (MSN), replacing most favored nation (MFN). This status would grant low or no tariffs to countries that practiced sustained-yield harvesting of resources, that did not despoil the environment, that did not allow worker exploitation, and that did not have corrupt government officials selling off tribal forests to the highest corporate bidder. Such countries would be given the freest access to Western markets. Nations that continue to ruin peoples and lands would be penalized by significantly higher tariffs that would reinternalize the costs those countries thought were being "saved" by taking social and economic shortcuts. Their products would become uncompetitive, and they would have little incentive to continue industrial degradation.
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7. Goal: Restore the guardian.
There can be no healthy business sector unless there is a healthy governing sector. In her book Systems of Survival (Random House, 1992) Jane Jacobs describes two overarching moral syndromes that permeate our society: the commercial syndrome, which arose from trading cultures; and the governing, or guardian, syndrome, which arose from territorial cultures. The guardian system is conservative and hierarchical, adheres to tradition, values loyalty, and shuns trading and innovation. The commercial system, on the other hand, is based on trading and can function well only when it is open, trusting of outsiders, innovative, positive, and forward thinking. Jacobs's thesis is that, ideally, society should separate those two functions as completely as possible. Trouble ensues when the two systems become confused about their roles and each takes on the functions of the other, for it's then that the positive attributes of one system become the vices of the other. When the guardian syndrome intrudes, with its hierarchical, bureaucratic methodology, into the realm of commerce, it founders because it is no match for business in quickness and creativity. That's what we saw in Eastern Europe. What's also true, but not so obvious in the West, is that when business plays government, governance fails as well, which is what we're seeing in the United States, Japan, and other countries.
Strategy: Get business out of government.
Democracy has been effectively eliminated in America by the influence of money, lawyers, and a political system that is the outgrowth of the first two. While we can dream of restoring our democratic system, the fact remains that we are in a plutocratic system of governance. Our guardian system has almost completely broken down because of the control exercised by business and, to a lesser degree, other organizations. Business and unions have to get out of government. We need more than campaign reform; we need a vision that allows business to see that when Speaker of the House Tom Foley exempts the aluminum industry in his district from the Btu tax or when Philip Morris donates $200,000 to the Jesse Helms Citizenship Center, citizenship is mocked and democracy is left gagging and twitching on the Capitol steps. The irony is that business thinks it is doing the right thing in its efforts to control the legislative agenda. The reality is that business is preventing the economy from evolving.
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Our economy has many design flaws, but the most glaring is that nature is cyclical and industrialism is linear. In nature, no linear systems exist, or at least not for long because they exhaust themselves. Linear industrial systems take resources, transform them into products or services, discard waste, and sell to consumers, who discard more waste when they have "consumed" the product. But of course, we don't consume TVs, cars, or most of the other stuff we buy. Instead, Americans produce six times their body weight every week in hazardous and unusable waste. Cyclical means of production are designed to imitate natural systems, in which waste equals food for other forms of life, in which nothing is thrown away, in which symbiosis replaces competition.
As an example of this redesign, the authors have created a system to retrofit every window in a major American city. The project would go like this: The city and a major window manufacturer would form a joint venture to produce superglazed windows in the town. That jointly owned company would come to your home or business, measure all the windows and glass doors, and then within 72 hours replace them with windows with superinsulating R-12 ratings. The new custom-manufactured windows could have exactly the same casements, moldings, and general appearance as the old. You would receive a $500 check upon installation and pay for the replacement windows over a 30-year period through increased property taxes. However, the amount you'd end up paying is guaranteed to be less than the amount you'd save on your energy bills. In other words, the windows would cost you nothing. To finance the project, the city would issue Industrial Development Bonds. The factory would train and employ more than 300 people in jobs of every description, from sweeping the factory floor to advanced multimedia robotics and chemistry. The windows removed would be checked for toxins and then completely recycled and reused, with the glass melted and the frames ground up and mixed with recycled thermoplastic resins that are extruded to make the casements. Once the entire city was reglazed, the residents and businesses would have an extra $20 million to $30 million every year, money saved on utility bills. After the windows were paid for, the savings would go even higher. The factory, designed to be transportable, would move to another city, where the initiating partnership would continue to retain a carried interest. This is a win-win-win-win-win system. The rate payers, the homeowners, the city, the citizens, the environment, and the factory employees all would thrive because they would be making money from efficiency rather than exploitation.
