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-What the Bleep Do We Know at Lyratek.com?

This article attempts to show how several ideals, basic to our philosophy of how government should operate,
apply to environmental concerns. Interested readers may therefore wish to begin with our primer on these,
entitled: "The Evolution of Political Ideals"

Green Control Both the emergence of Canada's Green Party leader into televised media coverage including the all-important leaders' debate, and the recent attempt by other parties to artificially paint themselves with the veneer of the Green Party's platform, have done much to energize the voters' passion for making substantial environmental progress in society. But it's important to remember in this day and age that green is in fashion, being environmentally friendly is hip, and marketers everywhere know this. The green label is being aplied willy-nilly to all sorts of people, products, plans, and companies, many of which contain no substantial difference from the same old, business-as-usual, unhelpful impact on the environment. We all need to remember to take a critical look at what is being promoted to us as being "green", before simply buying into it and patting ourselves on the back for appeasing our environmental conscience.

The Carbon Tax Motivator

There are two primary hopes of what a carbon tax should achieve, both of which fail the test of aligning themselves with our evolution. The first hope is to motivate people financially to pollute less where carbon is concerned, and encourage the use of alternate energy sources. Sounds great on the surface.

But common sense will quickly tell you that we are all polluters in the end, not just the big evil corporations. Whatever carbon taxes are layed on the oil companies will be passed on to the consumers at the gas pumps. Coal burning electric plants will add their carbon tax to your hydro bill, even if your region has a massive waterfall harnessed to generate electricity, because the electrical supply is all lumped together. Etcetera, etcetera, and all with the mark-up that companies add when covering their costs, a mark-up that is clearly outside of the claim of the tax being revenue-neutral for the government. Will there really be enough of a drop in income tax to compensate? Will you be in the right tax bracket? ...too many conditions...

More importantly, do consumers really have a choice in the matter? Will they have to give up on any transportation based on the internal combustion engine to avoid high carbon tax based charges, to the point where they will not be able to get to work at all any more? I was recently in the market for a new car, and already motivated (without any carbon tax, thank you) to find one that ran on alternative fuels. Guess what? They don't exist yet for the average consumer. "Hybrid" has become THE green buzz-word in the auto industry, placating people into thinking that environmentally friendly advancement has been made in the auto sector. They still require gas, and you will still be polluting, so are the extra dollars worth it for a hybrid when we know something better and vastly different MUST follow before it's too late? In my case, I decided not. Chevrolet in particular has recently created a lot of attractive car ads for their hybrids and other ideas - be warned that Chevy hybrids consistently get the worst fuel mileage of any hybrid out there, so bad in fact that you can get better in a regular car! And all the great ideas beyond "hybrid" are still in the drawing room, and on prototypes that haven't moved beyond the showroom floor at fancy auto shows. And as for the alternative fuels that these prototypes run on, you might be able to find some at a few select locations in California or Vancouver, but rural Ontario? Forget it! And will these new cars stand up to running in brutal Ontario winter conditions? Probably not yet tested....

So, as far as motivation is concerned, a carbon tax seems to me to be creating a similar situation to the monkey in a cage whose floor consisted of different coloured squares he could choose to stand on, after experimenters had added electric shocks to come from each colour of square until they all gave shocks. Now, instead of choosing the green squares over the red and yellow ones, the monkey got a shock no matter where he stood and entered into a nervous breakdown and all sorts of other problems.

A carbon tax may become a good public motivator once choices are available to the consumer. We are not there yet. Carbon tax fails the motivation test.

But perhaps even more insidiously, the proponents of the carbon tax as a motivator are subconsciously equating tax with punishment. I suggest we will evolve when we can look at tax as payment to government for services rendered, and where we can look at all payments we make with an attitude of gratitude.

Carbon Tax Addiction

As with so many other issues, carbon pollution has been reduced in political platforms to shifting money around, and I'm not impressed. Government needs to learn to tackle issues, and express their plans for those issues, not with amounts of money, or channels for redirecting money, but in the actual actions of the people which the money will fund. Which alternative fuel vehicle will be put on the market where I live? How are the wind, water and solar projects progressing at replacing coal for producing electricity? If you want to talk about a Green Shift, these are the things on which the discussion must center.

If you want to talk instead about shifting money around, government has yet to take the bull by the horns and tackle its most fundamental issue yet, leading us out of a debt-based economy by switching to a debt-free currency. That's a whole other topic, which you can learn about from our article on Monetary Reform.

Trust the Green Desire on the other side of the Fence

Which leads me to an issue with the Green Party of Canada which I sincerely hope they tackle and overcome, because they have what seems to be the strongest and noblest reason for existing than any other party out there. It seems that many of its members, and in fact many politicians of all parties and all levels of government, are simply inexperienced at living in harmony with nature, knowing what nature's cycles are, and spiritually speaking understanding how MANKIND IS A PART OF NATURE. Former Green candidate Richard Thomas saw this within his own party and inspired my trust in the political process and in regional representation when he resolved to work on it at further Green Party meetings. I see the Green Party attracting lots of urban dwellers who feel divorced from nature and feel compelled to reverse the trend, which is powerfully good. But this illusion of separation is natural for third-density thinking, and in Fourth Density will give way to the realization that we have never been separate from nature. In short, the human voice is an important, integral part of nature, and we will not achieve harmony by choking it off. We need to aim for balance

As we integrate with nature and the environment, we understand that being in harmony with it means we both listen to its needs, and become unafraid to express our own needs to the rest of nature. Many members of the animal kingdom need to express territorial claims over their personal living spaces to other animals... well guess what? Man often needs to express his claim to the animals as well, in their language: actions, gestures, sounds, and even reshaping the environment to form your dwelling, living space, or community meeting area. Many proposed "green" policies make rural dwellers shake their heads in dismay. Everyday citizens should not have their tools for expressing themselves in nature taken away and/or tied up in an immoveable tangle of beaurocratic red-tape, in the mistaken idea that urban office-working members of government know best, and that citizens cannot be trusted to act in harmony with nature.

Tree-planting, while benign and good in itself, is in danger of being elevated to the status of a symbolic represention of green environmental-friendliness no matter the context, where it often acts as an appeasement of our conscience rather than actual decisive action on becoming more balanced with nature. Anyone who has lived beside a forest and paid attention to it over a period of time should be able to tell you, trees do exercise the capacity to reproduce themselves. In fact, they easily overpopulate an area with more saplings than will be able to find enough light for photosynthesis and nutrients from the soil, and only the strongest will grow to full height and age. Tree-planting is a great balancing act for large areas that were unfairly clear-cut, or have otherwise lost massive amounts of vegetation. But balance is the goal, and many other areas can become quickly over-run. The concept of sending every tree-cutting decision to a municipal board, particularly for an area that has not experienced clear-cutting, is so impractical, it could only have come out of a mindset divorced of real experience of living with nature.

So learn to honour human expression as much as any other part of nature, and trust that a desire in your neighbour for greater harmony with the environment will sprout from their efforts to transform alongside of you. Give up the need to control, and balance and harmony with nature will begin to flow. The future is only as ideal as we make it. Aim high.

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If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in:

"The Evolution of Political Ideals" A parent page that will be continually updated with information and links to our new series of articles, and highlighting the philosophical underpinnings in our politics and governmental systems. "Monetary Reform" Here we outline what publicly accountable governments could do to reclaim their power over the banks and end the debt-based financial shell games and budgetary concerns that affect government's ability to deal with nearly EVERY other issue of importance. Do this year's scare tactics reflect all the historical hall-marks of yet another public banking scam?

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