Mother Nature Belongs at the Bargaining Table: Reprinted from Other Words

Throwing the nation over the climate cliff will make our current fiscal challenges look like a minor bump in the road.

By Jill Stein

As the highly scripted stagecraft of the presidential campaign fades from the headlines, there's a new show in Washington. ”Fiscal Cliff” stars President Barack Obama, who urges Republicans and Democrats to agree on a ”grand bargain” that would soften the economic shock of the impending across-the-board tax and spending cuts. But that bipartisan handshake would be nothing to celebrate.

World Bank Photo Collection/Flickr

Here's why: Both parties are intent on imposing an austerity budget bloated with military spending and private-industry health insurance waste. That would be a raw deal for the American people.

It's a sign of Washington's rightward drift that a Democratic president has offered to put Social Security on the chopping block, even though it hasn't contributed one dime to the deficit. And Obama has offered to cut Medicare rather than pursue an improved ”Medicare for All” insurance system that could save trillions over the next decade by eliminating the wasteful bureaucracy and medical inflation inherent in our private health insurance system.

Equally troubling, both parties are ignoring another problem that's truly critical: the climate cliff.

Our planet is rapidly approaching a geophysical tipping point at which the consequences of climate change, such as the disappearance of polar ice caps and the melting of frozen methane deposits, trigger an unstoppable acceleration of warming. Once that happens, it will render our climate incompatible with civilization as we know it.

Throwing the nation over the climate cliff will make our current fiscal challenges look like a minor bump in the road.

Mother Nature must also have a seat at the negotiating table as our leaders hash out their supposedly grand bargain. In a nation already reeling from droughts, wildfires, and superstorms, budget priorities must reconcile the climate and economic imperatives. After all, they're ultimately one and the same.

Our current drive to expand oil and gas drilling on U.S. soil is part of a bipartisan energy policy that's doing nothing to reduce unsustainably high carbon emissions. Showpiece programs to encourage renewable energy alternatives like solar and wind can't avert climate disaster unless they're going to replace fossil fuels.

The $15 billion a year that Obama wants to invest in renewable energy is a small fraction of what's being spent every month on the latest Wall Street bailout. Any boost the environment might get from his administration's showpiece renewable energy programs is more than cancelled by its promotion of dirty energy that runs from natural gas fracking to coal and nuclear reactors, and an expansion of oil drilling in our national parks, offshore, and in the Arctic.

We can avoid both the fiscal and climate crises only if we democratize our priorities and put the public interest ahead of the profiteering elite. One blueprint for this is the Green New Deal, which served as the mainstay of my presidential bid as the Green Party's nominee. Our plan would launch an emergency program to create 25 million jobs in green energy, sustainable agriculture, public transportation, and infrastructure improvements. It would also cut spending, making big tax hikes unnecessary.

Our Green New Deal would be funded by a combination of waste-cutting and targeted fair-tax reforms. These include scaling back the Pentagon's bloated budget to year 2000 levels.

A ”Medicare for All” health insurance system would provide health care to everyone, while eliminating the massive private health insurance bureaucracy and reducing the medical inflation that's straining federal, state, and household budgets alike.

Our proposed tax reforms would extend the Bush tax cuts for 90 percent of Americans. It would rein in Wall Street speculation with a small (0.5 percent) tax on financial transactions, generating $350 billion annually. Capital gains would be taxed as income, and income would be taxed more progressively, with multi-millionaires and billionaires paying in the 50-80 percent range, just as they did before the tax giveaways of recent decades.

If we are to have an economy that serves the people and creates a livable planet for the future, we must insist on nothing less than a grand bargain that is truly worthy of the name. 

Jill Stein won half a million votes as the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2012. jillstein.org
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

Ocean Plastic packaging from Method

One of the most pervasive ongoing environmental concerns is the tremendous amount of plastic we as a society generate. There are plastic islands floating in the oceans is estimated to be approximately twice the size of Hawaii. This plastic waste also gets consumed by the sea creatures and becomes part of our food stream.

Method Soap company has decided to build awareness for this problem through innovative packaging on their latest hand soap. The bottle is made from 100% recycled plastic that was gathered by volunteer groups on the coastlines of Hawaii. Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii and Kokua Hawaii Foundation has collected over one ton of plastic required to create the packaging.

Our Daily Green received a bottle of the Method Dish + Hand soap in exchange for this article. The packaging is opaque dark grey with a design that is reminiscent of starfish along the bottle.

We commend Method for drawing awareness to this growing problem and offering a small step in the right direction. The less we create new plastic and instead reuse what is already in existence, the cleaner our environment will be. Their innovative product is available exclusively at Whole Foods Market. With enough consumer support, we hope more companies will look into recycled packaging instead of using virgin resources.

Build it Green

Our Daily Green comes from the school of thought that saving energy is up there with saving dollars. In fact, growing up in the home of Papa Green, there was always one light too many on. He loved to insulate, turn off lights, and keep the thermostat at the lowest possible setting.

Several years ago, Papa built a new home in Florida. One of the most exciting parts of building his home was the amazing technology he used, the insulated concrete forms that he found to use as building material. They were guaranteed to keep him from spending unwanted dollars on heating or cooling as the construction of the forms was designed to insulate the home above and beyond simple insulation.

In the photo to the right, you'll notice the deep set windows. That is a result of how the forms are constructed. They are much like the popular children's building blocks that snap together to form a structure. Durisol is also energy efficient and superior to their ancestor that was made with Styrofoam as the impact on the environment during production is minimal.The blocks are soundproof, fireproof, impact resistant, healthy and termite proof.

Indoor air quality is not a concern because Durisol does not use polystyrene, but instead utilizes a proprietary cement-bonded wood fiber material that has only natural ingredients of specially graded recycled waste wood (100% clean, natural softwood lumber).

If you are considering building green, we highly recommend doing some research on the insulated concrete forms on the market.

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