Category Archives: alongshot

from old Blogger blog

Budgeting for “the commons” needs business “eco-balance” sheets

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A comprehensive method guiding investors
to compete for profiting the commons

It would not just count profits but also liabilities, in financial terms, using monetized business ESG balance sheets (eco-balance sheets), in combination with normal financial balance sheets.

Then everyone will see the real societal financial costs of making money today, that present or even past investors might well be held responsible for.

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The full application of this principle is “A World SDG“, to provide TRUE MEASURES of sustainability for business, consumer and policy choices, and applying the basic science research for ‘Scope 4’ accounting and the 2011 Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) paper It is still “new science” though, and so demands fresh questions too.  It takes investigating the actual organization of the working systems of our world, looking for regular patters of in the system as a whole, what causes them and how they are change, more than theory.  It’s surprising both how little we notice going on around us, and how much we see but don’t notice what is implies.   A workshop method for opening people’s eyes to what’s really happening all around them can be found in the 3Step Method of Learning to Work with Nature. 

The original version of this proposal was submitted to the Rio+20 Dialogues for comment and voting as: Budgeting for “the commons” needs business “ecobalance” sheets, to compare environmental liabilities and benefits”. See “News of the Commons” for introductions to the vision and the systems thinking needed for a commons based approach to sustainability.  It’s part of my “reality math” series.

It’s proposed as part of the foundation of collaborative free market institutions needed for the health of the competitive free markets, as an element of Helene Finidori’s “Commons-Sense” and the “commons based economic models” she proposed.  Their intent is to solve the global economic crisis by making the commons work for the whole, as a replacement for the paradigm of “prosperity” with ever expanding development.

The proposal would accelerate how the business community is responding to their environmental liabilities. They’re hiring teams of sustainabilty experts, using comprehensive sustainabilty reporting (CSR) to track Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) factors, following both private and public standards, such as for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The reason business has a new interest in environmental liabilities is that they are driving corporate assessed values, as economic liabilities.

To protect natural resources local stakeholders would still need a say in the use of local resources.   To protect global resources for the future an equitable way to restrain growing economic demand is needed.   World standards for Comprehensive Sustainability Reporting (CSR) wold accurately assess the impacts of business products.  Then Economic Liability Assessments (ELA) of their economic costs to our future, would allow the world to act as a resource commons.   It would provide equitable market constraints on high impacts would, to suppress demand, and fund investment in alternatives.   ELA reports would be the basis of the “Eco-balance sheets” called for below, to be reported in business annual reports and factored into Pigovian taxes/tariffs on their products and services.

The basic scientific methods of doing accurate CSR and ELA assessments are what are discussed below.    The current statistical methods of environmental and economic accounting contain a major systematic inaccuracy. Simply said the error is in relying on tracing individual records rather than assessing whole system requirements,

an inaccuracy caused by not asking who sliced up the pie, to check the accuracy of trying to trace all the crumbs.

a scientific method difference
between economic accounting and systems accounting

Slices of a business energy pie mostly go uncounted when relying on traceable records, leaving out all the energy demands of business services.

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Our Economic Liabilities for Environmental Damage
are direct costs of prior profits for business
that went unaccounted for.

New systems physics (3) would now allow the development of model “eco-balance sheets” to be placed along side normal “financial balance sheets” in annual business reports.   That would provide a clear and quicker way than others for using market forces to correct our systemic problem of unaccountable impacts on our future.

Businesses have long accumulated unaccountable impacts by investing in growing irreversible exploitation, and now accelerating depletion, of what once seemed limitless capacities of people and the earth.   It’s enormously costly for our future.

Investors and business managers can make better investing decisions if ESG measures capture the whole impact.

Those investment strategies incurred very costly economic damage to our future economy, that the businesses that created them were not charged for.   For estimating environmental impact costs like that there are various methods, and some major recent innovations. Continue reading Budgeting for “the commons” needs business “eco-balance” sheets

Transition to New Blog Site

Posts on this site preceding this one were transferred from my oldest blog, I called “Alongshot“, from its blogspot.com site.   My main archive of blog posts is still at my original “Reading Nature’s Signals” blog, perhaps to be transferred at some point, and quite worth site searching for key words like this one for mentions of Keynes.

The move is really from one directory to another, on Synapse9.com, needed to upgrad the format to WordPress 3.1.3.  The old blog site just got to be a problem.

My original systems physics research is still at The physics of happening, and scattered around Synapse9.com, along with my collections of images, reference libraries, introductions and writing .

My subjects and writing style, of course, will remain just as “primitive” (whether you saw that as a liability or benefit I leave to you) so the software upgrade won’t really change anything but the look and feel.   ;-)

real cause; money multiplies, earth doesn’t

Money will multiply as long as there are profits, because people with money multiply their own profits that way.   As JM Keynes among others pointed out, when real productivity approaches limits, multiplying money will drive profits to zero. Driving profits to zero triggers waves of collapse, providing a means for our responding to our limits on earth.

It takes a little exploration to lead people to just how the present waves of money collapse are directly related to declines in the profitability of the earth, but that’s a major contributor and the first cause.   Correcting the various immediate causes won’t fix that first cause.   None of the other causes would have mattered if profits were still multiplying dramatically as compounding money needs to remain stable.

Do yourself a favor, read my own or other peoples’ writings on it to find better questions for yourself.    Explorers starve or get buried by avalanches for reading to pass judgment.    You can come up with open questions in a blink, so don’t turn any page without finding one.

Best,

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

Now I’ve grown up!

It may appear that everything I’ve ever said before was foolish… or at least from a different point of view.

I still perhaps have some leftover habits from when I, like lots of other people, thought that showing other people how they were wrong might interest them in finding if I was right, and then look for a common understanding.  I assumed I would someday find people whose sincerity in that way would be unquestionable. I thought I grew up with people like that. Continue reading Now I’ve grown up!

Overshoot self-correction to collapse in the S&P 500 Mar-Aug 07

What’s it look like to you? The price swings in the S&P; 500 over the last 4 months seem to display the natural complex system self-controls of the financial system ‘fishtailing.
Systemic failure is generally the consequence of pushing self-correction mechanisms beyond their response limits. Continue reading Overshoot self-correction to collapse in the S&P 500 Mar-Aug 07

whether successfully averted for the moment or not, …

Hi folks,

…this week’s global run on credit seems like a casebook example of how a natural system failure to provide growing physical returns on investment would effect financial commitments for endlessly growing financial returns.   They  naturally conflict.

One thing we can do is watch it closely, so others may learn from our experience.   Because systemic collapse is a big physical process in a big physical system, displaying all-together new kinds of rapidly spreading behaviors, watch for that.   If you see that sort of thing perhaps you’ll ‘believe your eyes and ears’ and not feel the observations were ‘planted’ in your imagination somehow.

Remember what things seemed to mean before and after,
and make note of it.

RE: internalism…&things missing from approximation

Stan,
Approximation sweeps away ‘fuzziness’, and one thing your and my conceptions are completely consistent on is “any system during its development moves from being more vague to becoming more definitely embodied”. There are issues in differentiating descriptive, explanatory, and organizational/behavioral ‘fuzziness’, but it’s those “fuzzy bits” that are the main thing approximation sweeps away. But studying the ‘fuzziness’ is central to finding the half of the universe that physics missed.

My analytical approach interprets it as evidence of the transitional systems which frequently can be found to have periods of implied derivative continuity in their measures, displaying some of their evolving internal dynamic structures. That’s what I’ve been carefully studying for the last many years, but now mostly play with the wordings for to find some way to communicate.

Your grasp of the links to other fuzzy ways of thinking about the subject (it’s history and citations) is far superior to mine, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to ask you some questions about it shortly. Continue reading RE: internalism…&things missing from approximation

‘dice’ or ‘approximation’, does it matter?

I’ve been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein’s enigmatic complaint. In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can’t locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it seems unlikely. “God doesn’t roll dice”, is about something else. One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was Niels Bohr’s long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr 1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the elimination of causality and continuity.

“Yet, a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained, since, with his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without abandoning continuity and causality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this respect appeared to be the only way open to proceed with the immediate task.”

Continue reading ‘dice’ or ‘approximation’, does it matter?

Calculus for History Majors

As we discover the huge role complex natural systems have in change of all kinds, we’re finding that evolving systems are our environment, the whole context and much of the shape of history.

It’s high time history majors learned about the best method available for reading their changes. A most curious and revealing thing about complex systems is that the first evidence of emergent change is often a display of the physical property that corresponds to the central mathematical idea of calculus, continuity.

In a mathematical function you can define a slope, and the same is true of almost any real change in complex systems. Complex systems evolve through progressions, and applying a logic like that of calculus to measures of change over time shows you where the progressions emerge from the noise and when they shift.

It reveals a great deal about the nature of a system because it provides direct evidence of it’s creative behavior as a whole.

Continue reading Calculus for History Majors

Phil’s state of the planet 06

Last week I had a rare privilege to be exposed to some of the best of the visionary hard science and planning for saving the Earth from its more glaring human catastrophes. There’s a very bright picture, with an unusually dark side. Were in genuinely deep trouble. The conference was put on by Columbia Univ. Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs director and leader.

The bright side is that there does seem to be a path for changing energy consumption technologies in the developed world to keep ocean levels from rising more than 3 to 10 feet in the next century, holding it to a quarter of what it might well be, if we follow a fairly tightly scripted science-led and politically driven global program. Continue reading Phil’s state of the planet 06