The Good Human » Money

Profits Won’t Matter In A Post-Climate Change World.

david — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:00:06 +0000

All the profits in the world won’t matter one tiny bit if we don’t have a climate we can live in. Money cannot buy anyone a ticket off this rock we call home when it becomes uninhabitable in the very near-term. Why is that concept so lost on those who believe making money is more important than taking care of our home?

I am not against the idea of anyone making their own money and living a comfortable life, far from it; what I am against is doing so at such a high cost to the comfortable existence of every other human on earth. From strip-mining mountain tops for coal, to forcing chemicals into the ground to gain access to hidden natural gas (and destroying drinking water all over the east cost in the process), to politicians railing against proven science at the behest of oil companies, I feel as though we have found ourselves surrounded by selfish fools more interested in lining their bathrooms in gold-leaf wallpaper than in a healthy future for all humanity. And that hurts to have to believe about our fellow humans.

If 2011 was any indicator of things to come, we are in a lot of trouble. Extreme drought in Africa, record floods on the east coast and in Thailand, dangerous wildfires in Texas, and destructive tornadoes in the heartland of America all combined to set a record in 2011 for the most billion dollar disasters in a single year. That’s scary. And because we as a nation refuse to slow down our consumption habits, limit our greenhouse gas emissions, and sign on to international climate treaties, destructive weather is going to be the norm for the foreseeable future, until we finally finish ourselves off. Remember, the planet will be fine — it’s us that’s screwed.

According to NASA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the next 100 years we can expect the following:

Plant and animal species will face increasing competition for survival
A serious reduction in planetary biodiversity
Rising sea levels, which will make many current costal communities completely uninhabitable
More intense heat waves
Stronger hurricanes and blizzards
More virulent diseases
Worldwide food shortages

Nothing good will come from sitting on our hands while watching our drastically changing climate. Period. And yet we are living with some people and corporations still preoccupied with the archaic idea that they need more money than they could ever spend in a single lifetime, which many of them get through destructive means. Why are we allowing this to go on? Is there anything we can do?

I’m not sure anymore.

We are beyond the point of standing on street corners holding signs and flash mobs singing songs. We passed that point a long time ago. All the recycling and buying “greener” gifts at Christmas in the world is not going to save us anymore. We need new people in charge around the globe who care more about people than corporations, and every last one of us needs to make drastic changes in our behavior and lifestyles Switching out lightbulbs makes us feel good, but it’s not really going to do much in the big picture. It’s time to get tough, get honest with ourselves, and take a hard look in the mirror and see that the way most of us currently live needs to change if we want to have any chance of long-term survival.

We need to pay more for well-made heirloom-quality furniture and not instantly look for cheap paperboard stuff that lasts a year or two. Buy it once, keep it for life, pass it on.
We need to spend the extra money on organic foods, so that organic foods become the norm rather than the exception.
We need to live in smaller houses, live more local, and invest in our communities rather than in a faceless corporation with warehouses in faraway lands.
We need to start calling out corporations and environmental organizations for greenwashing the truth. We cannot expect groups like The Nature Conservancy to do the right thing for the rest of us when Monsanto is stuffing their back pockets with millions of dollars.

Maybe the key is that we need to work at convincing those who are diligently destroying the environment that all their money won’t matter for anything if they don’t work to slow down our rapidly changing climate. So maybe, just maybe, we can force them to wake up to that fact and use some of their earnings to do their part and help clean up our planet before it’s too late. We don’t really have any other options left, as the simple stuff that the majority of us try to do on our own cannot possibly outweigh the massive damage done by only a select few.

It’s time for some “top-down” change.

Image from BigStockPhoto

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Slow Money – Changing The Way We Think About And Spend Our Money

david — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:00:20 +0000

Q: I’ve heard of the slow food movement, but what is “slow money” all about?

“Slow Money” is the name for a movement started by socially conscious investing pioneer and author, Woody Tasch, who essentially borrowed the conceptual framework of “Slow Food”—whereby participants eschew convenience-oriented “fast” foods, instead filling up their plates with traditional, unprocessed and, ideally, locally produced foods—and applied it to personal finance and investing. As such, Slow Money is dedicated to connecting investors to their local economies by marshaling financial resources to invest in small food enterprises and local food systems.

Tasch’s vision for Slow Money, now not just a concept but also a non-profit organization, seeks nothing less than a complete overhaul of the way we think about and spend our money, channeling much more of it into producing healthy local food, strengthening local communities instead of multinational corporations, and restoring our flagging economy in the process. Instead of venture capital bankrolling far flung high tech start-ups, Tasch hopes to see “nurture capital” funding local merchants and producers who, in turn, plug half of their profits back into their communities, ensuring one small local virtuous circle that values soil fertility, carrying capacity, a sense of place, care of the commons, diversity, nonviolence, and cultural, ecological and economic health as much as financial return. Tasch hopes to get there by persuading a million Americans to invest at least one percent of their assets in local food systems by 2020.

Tasch started Slow Money in November 2008 after the publication of his book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered. Hitting the road to promote the book and the nascent movement in 2009, he was able to attract 450 intrigued investors, farmers and other entrepreneurs to Santa Fe, New Mexico to trade ideas at a three-day gathering. “We just wanted to see who would show up, but four of the small food enterprises that presented raised an aggregate of $260,000,” says Tasch. Tasch then organized another event for some 600 attendees the following June in Shelburne, Vermont. Investors there poured $4.2 million into 12 more producers, and that’s when Tasch knew he was really on to something. More than 1,000 people converged in San Francisco for the third event in October 2011, and Tasch expects untold amounts of “slow capital” to be changing hands for the better as a result.

Whether or not you have money to invest in Slow Money’s virtuous circles, you can show your support by visiting the group’s website and electronically signing the organization’s Principles, a list of six core beliefs shared by the Slow Money community. Or if you have just $25, you could park it with the organization’s Soil Trust, which will seed small food enterprises that promote soil fertility in locales from coast to coast. Tasch sees the Soil Trust as key to opening up the Slow Money concept to all of us and achieving the group’s goal of getting a million Americans involved in the movement over the next decade.

Another key to achieving Tasch’s goal is growth of leadership at the local level. To that end, a dozen autonomous local chapters have sprung up nationwide, with more sure to come as word gets out. The local groups have already gifted or lent hundreds of thousands of dollars to entities working to improve their own community “foodsheds.” Now we all have a way to truly put our money where our mouths are.

CONTACTS: Slow Money.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E – The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Tax Incentives For Energy-Efficiency Improvements.

david — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:30:50 +0000

Dear EarthTalk: Since Obama took office, have any new incentives been put in place for homeowners looking to increase energy efficiency and reduce the overall environmental footprints of their homes?

In fact, yes. Homeowners can get up to $1,500 back from the federal government for any number of energy efficiency upgrades at home. If you upgrade to energy efficient insulation, windows, doors, heating, air conditioning or water heaters between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2010, you are eligible for a tax credits of up to 30 percent of product costs.

The credit is capped at $1,500 combined; meaning it only applies to $5,000 in total costs. More details are available at the website of the Tax Incentives Assistance Project, a coalition of public interest nonprofit groups, government agencies and other organizations focused on energy efficiency.

Of course, the Obama administration is also thinking long term, and would like to leave its mark in furthering efforts to wean ourselves off foreign oil and increase our production and use of homegrown clean renewable energy. In light of such priorities, tax credits are also available for 30 percent of the cost – with no upper limit – on the installation of renewable energy equipment at home, such as geothermal heat pumps, solar panels, solar hot water heaters, small wind energy systems and fuel cells.

Homeowners won’t get the money back when they initially pay for equipment or upgrades, but they can add the credit amount to their overall tax refund, or deduct it from what they owe, when filing their federal income tax forms at the end of the year. Unlike tax deductions, which merely lower the total amount of taxable income, tax credits reduce dollar-for-dollar the amount of tax owed.

Homeowners should know that they can also get federally backed mortgages to pay for a variety of energy efficiency measures, including renewable energy technologies, on their new or existing homes. The federal government supports these loans by insuring them through the Federal Housing Authority or Veterans Affairs programs, allowing borrowers who might otherwise not qualify to pursue upgrades, and securing lending institutions against loan default.

Don’t own a home? Depending upon make and model, you can get between $250 and $3,400 back from the federal government for buying or leasing a new hybrid or high efficiency diesel automobile. And the automakers themselves – through their own “Automotive Stimulus Plan” – are giving consumers up to $4,500 back on the purchase of a new or used vehicle that gets gas mileage of at least two miles per gallon better than their old model.

A number of new energy-efficiency incentives are also available at the state level across the country. The Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy website provides up-to-date listings of what may be available in your neck of the woods. With so much encouragement, how could you not want to go green?

CONTACTS: Tax Incentives Assistance Project, www.energytaxincentives.org; Automotive Stimulus Plan, www.automotivestimulus.org; Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy, www.dsireusa.org.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php. EarthTalk is now a book! Details and order information at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalkbook.

Blog Action Day 2008 – Poverty Around The World And At Home.

david — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Today is Blog Action Day – a day where ~~almost 9,000~~ 9,400 bloggers around the world get together to write on one single topic in the hope of creating a new awareness. The topic this year is Poverty. And while I could write a thesis on the subject and how its impact is felt around the world by both the poor and wealthy alike (in different ways), I wanted to talk about poverty as it relates to our current economic crisis here at home. I read a quote the other day that went as follows:

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach. ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt

That says so much doesn’t it? Here we have the bankers on Wall Street and the wealthiest Americans crying wolf, and the government jumps to attention to bail them out. Over 70% of the population did not want to fund this bailout because they knew it would do nothing for the regular people and only help out the banks and the wealthy. But Congress did it anyway, and is taking $700 billion of our tax dollars and “saving” the banks and CEO’s. However, each and every day in this country, there are people going hungry, children in failing schools, people living on the street, and 46 million without health insurance. Why is it that we don’t hear their cries? Why is it that there isn’t $700 billion to help these people? It is amazing to me that the wealthiest country on earth (well, up until maybe 2 weeks ago) cannot manage to come up with a few million or billion dollars to help those who need help each and every single day, but can manage to “find” $700+ billion to give to banks and CEO’s. I understand that a lot of people have been losing money in the market; I have lost quite a bit myself. And for those nearing retirement, these are scary times indeed. But the collapse is the fault of these banks and mortgage companies that got greedy, and now they are getting bailed out with our money. Poor people? Never mind them, we can’t hear them – we can ignore them completely. This goes on around the world on a daily basis, and just because you cannot see or hear them does not mean they doesn’t exist.

In honor of Blog Action Day 2008, I will be donating any and all advertising income from all my sites to Kiva.org, which is one of the world”™s first person-to-person micro-lending websites, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. These entrepreneurs use their loans to start businesses that lift them and their communities out of poverty. If you would like to donate as well, please check out the Blog Action Day Lending Team.