Natural Capitalism

I have been discussing, on Facebook, with fellow advocates of an RBE whether the ideas presented in the book Natural Capitalism are valid and helpful in the transition to an RBE which most people, if not everyone, agree cannot happen overnight. One of the principles that NatCap and an RBE share is that what we need are services, and not goods in themselves. One example used is the chauffagiste, who provides the service of keeping your home warm, for which you pay him. In our current economic system, it will clearly make sense for him to do this cost efficiently, as any £ he saves can be kept as profits and/or passed on as cost savings to the end user.

From an environmental poin of view, one would hope that this would lead to reduced waste / pollution and use of non-renewable resources, but it might be the case that your chauffagiste buys energy from a producer who is polluting like billy-ho but producing energy at low unit cost to the end user. In NatCap terms this is because the right to pollute is under-priced. If it wasn't, and all the externalities of producing energy were costed into the unit price, the rising price itself would itself provide the disincentive to use the energy inefficiently.

Once every natural resource has a price on it, maybe NatCap will arrive at an RBE through its own method and logic.

NatCap would see everything given a price so that Capitalism obeyed its own rule of not liquidating capital (natural capital here) and calling it income. So, if the price of physical resources included all externalities, the factory gate price of the good (energy in my example) would not vary in those terms. It would still vary by the efficiency of the corporation - ie how much it was paying out in wages. Capitalism seeks out the cheapest labour and cheap ways to replace human labour, but in doing so reduces the spending power of the consumers it needs to keep spending to keep cyclic consumption going. This is how capitalism destroys itself.