Capital Gains Summary and Analysis

This chapter is dedicated to the inequity of value placed on natural capital and the things that destroy it. The Biosphere studies identified what financial cost would be involved in trying to equate the life-sustaining abilities of an ecosystem in a closed system, and the costs for only 8 people were more than $200 million. Similarly, studies into artificially producing the environmental conditions necessary for life globally that we are destroying with industry are astronomical, and still the conditions would be inadequate. Instead, there must be a recognition in business that natural capital is invaluable, and that protecting and restoring it must trump traditional ideas if we are to survive.

Subsidies are the way the government has encouraged economic growth in one direction instead of another in the past, and so must logically be used again. Bringing about the changes that...