The Proper Coupling Package

The Proper Coupling Package ^PDF - This chapter from Analytical Activsm presents an example of how the technical side of the sustainability problem could be solved. This is done in a manner that appears to be not only the most technically efficiently way possible, but also the most economically appealing way possibe. Here's the chapter summary:

Currently the human system is improperly coupled to the larger system it lies within: the environment. The result is the runaway environmental overshoot we see today. It appears possible to engineer a business model that is so ethically and financially attractive that its rapid adoption by the global business community would solve the sustainability problem as quickly as is realistically possible.

This chapter presents a theoretical foundation for how this can be done, using an analysis of why the two systems are presently improperly coupled and a proposal based on that analysis that would result in a highly efficient, self-managing proper coupling of the two systems.

The goal of the Proper Coupling Package is to properly couple the human system to the environment, so that the human system acts in an environmentally sustainable manner. The package consists of three solution elements: Environmental Property Rights, Reflective Pricing, and Worldism:

1. Based on the even more fundamental concept of common property rights, an environmental property right is the legal right to own and manage a common environmental “property,” such as the percentage of atmospheric CO2 or the health of a river, in much the same way that private property is owned and managed.

2. Reflective Pricing is about the simplest possible implementation of how to manage environmental properties. It uses "fees" to push properties into the safezone, where they are sustainable, and "buys" to pull them there. Fees are relatively small. Given the size of the system, huge amounts of fees will be collected. A very small portion of fees goes to administrative expenses and profits. The rest, probably over 95%, goes to buying things like R&D, transfers of technology to undeveloped countries, pilot programs, and implementation of programs affecting broad swaths of the environment.

3. Worldism is global cooperation on global problems and opportunities, which is necessary to make and enforce the decisions necessary for a uniform global implementation of Environmental Property Rights.

Once environmental property rights are created by new laws, corporations can file claims to unclaimed environmental properties. Then they use fees and buys to manage a property. How this works is explained in the diagram below.