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Non-renewables become very much more expensive in this frame - how can you price something which literally can never be replaced?
But as we saw only last night, it is quite possible to apply energy to carbon dioxide and water and come up with the products (eg gasoline & petrochemicals) of "non-renewables".
Doing so will become "economic" when the energy cost of that process is less than the energy cost of other sources. ie the "price" of crude oil becomes the energy content.
IMHO the unmatched US human/intellectual resources currently wasted on the military are capable of doing just this, if only the "enterprise model" existed for them to do so.
At the moment the choices are between:
(a) State provision (a new, and Keynesian, New Deal) which is politically unacceptable in the US; and
(b) conventional Capital - "Equity" and "Debt" - which is fucked, probably terminally.
But I believe that unconventional "unitisation" of future land and energy value streams not only squares the investment and monetary circle, but will do so in a networked way from the ground up. "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
If you frame the environment as half the source of all prosperity - which ultimately it is, being the source of all raw materials and energy inputs - you can cost the value of resources of every type more realistically than if you count products of raw resources in terms of their nominal economic utility.
This is why biofuels are such a fiasco. In terms of natural prosperity economics they're not just barely cheaper, if at all, than oil, they're shuffling deck chairs around by taking energy from one place - food production - and moving it to another.
Natural prosperity accounting would make shifts like these explicit and central, not peripheral and easy to disguise.
Of course you still have to account for more conventional utility. But the equation becomes:
value = resource taxes (including energy inputs) x innovation multiplier x human conscription ('work') x desirability x profit
In a natural prosperity economy, the only true source of profit is the innovation multiplier, so traditional corporate profit - which is 'rent' paid on 'capital' - will have to be eliminated.
Infinitely renewable resources, or intellectual and creative products which use no physical resources at all, will pay no resource taxes. Extremely scarce items will pay very high taxes. If - and only if - ways are found to make them less scarce, the taxes can be lowered.
Desirability engineering can be used to create demand, but it should be valued less than original innovation.
And I don't agree with the use of land as a key resource. It's certainly one key resource, but it's also a return to a feudalism of sorts.
If I happen to find a gold-mine under my house the value of my land increases dramatically, and accounted for - and probably taxed - accordingly.
Value of land is a very contingent concept, which is why it can't be counted as a primary resource.
That's why Energy Accounting could only have come from people who discount all other forms of "value".
ThatBritGuy:
Exactly: but I advocate a form of feudalism where tribute is given to Society generally, and not an individual with a bigger axe than you have...
Like it or not, most of the value in circulation (more than two thirds in the developed world) is in fact land-based.
I advocate getting rid of the current overlay of financial claims on land, and essentially reinventing the "property" relationship. "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
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