Environmentally Responsible
Governments & Economies

Environmental Goals
for Governments

Environmental Responsibilities

Governments need to advance:

– environmental and climate protection laws.

– ecological and wildlife protection laws.

– regional and locally managed ecological conservation.

– sustainable use of limited natural resources.

– clean non-polluting energy production and industrial processes.

– business accountability for environmental damages or depletion of public natural resources and natural ecosystems, along with financial accountability for industrial and product carbon-emissions.

– business incentives for restoring and improving natural ecosystems, freshwater sources, wildlife habitats, forests, and farm soils, along with financial incentives for reducing carbon-emissions and for carbon-capturing.

Environmental Protections

– Ensure the Rights of Future Generations to live in a
future-sustained and thriving Natural Environment.

– Establish national and local environmental protective regulations.

– Protect air quality and the ozone.

– Protect freshwater sources, watersheds, and water quality.

– Protect important natural resources: local, regional, national, and global.

– Protect rare and needed mineral resources.

– Protect the Earth's ecosystems and biodiversity.

– Establish nature and wildland conservation areas.

– Protect endangered wildlife and habitats.

– Protect special areas of natural beauty, scenic landscapes, and recognised sacred lands.

– Ensure that economic development projects are environmentally sustainable and unharmful to local ecosystems or to the global climate.

– Establish climate-solving policies, such as penalizing carbon-emissions and incentivizing carbon-capturing.

– Establish special fines & taxes for climate-harming industrial and energy-production emissions.

– Establish special fines & taxes for all industrial toxic-chemicals leaked or allowed into the air, watersheds, or oceans.

Ecological Conservation
and Management

– Provide stewardship and management of the natural environment.

– Protect and restore natural areas, natural ecosystems and wildlife habitats.

– Protect and restore forest, pastoral, and water ecosystems.

– Reverse land and soil degradation, desertification and soil erosion.

– Restore and improve freshwater sources, wetlands, watersheds and aquifers.

– Incentivize local & regional ecological-restoration, tree planting, soil regeneration, watershed and wetlands restoration, with gov funded projects and employment.

– Establish and maintain naturally-regenerative wildlands and nature corridors.

– Establish more biodiversity and wildlife reserves.

– Lawfully protect great wildlife mammals, especially endangered wildlife species, and prevent extinctions; with strong criminal prosecution of offenders.

– Protect wildlife from cruel methods of hunting, trapping, and fishing, that cause extreme, prolonged or avoidable suffering.

– Protect animals from cruelty and avoidable suffering in animal food farming.

– Promote sustainable farming and soil-regeneration, and find ways to complement farmland with natural wildlands and the local ecosystems.

– Promote biodiverse seed conservation.

– Protect and restore coastal marine areas and ocean life.

– Prevent marine eutrophication and ocean acidification.

– Protect ocean-ecosystems and ocean-life by establishing conservation rules and regulations on ocean fishing and other ocean uses.

– Ecologically Manage the use of depleting natural resources from the land and oceans.

– Ecologically Manage the extraction and use of the Earth's non-renewable natural resources, to minimize their depletion and prevent environmental toxic-pollution from their extractive processes.

Protect Oceans & Coastal Waters

– Establish sustainable ocean management, with ocean regulations and protections.

– Protect oceans, bays and marinas from chemical and plastics pollution, untreated sewage and eutrophication, oil spills and fuel spillage.

– Establish marine sanctuaries and protected fish-migration corridors in ecologically vulnerable areas.

– Protect ocean ecosystems, habitats, coral reefs, and important fish colonies from harmful ocean-use; such as eco-harmful fishing practices and the mining of minerals & metals from the ocean bottom.

– Protect oceans & sea-life from bottom-trolling, overfishing, and fish-harming 'by-catch'.

– Promote sustainable & ecologically-responsible ocean fishing, with ocean fishing rules.

– Incentivize ecological & health-quality aquaculture.

Stop Pollution
of the air, water, and land

– Acknowledge that environmental health and a non-polluted environment is a human right.

– Prevent all forms of pollution entering into the air, waters, and land.

– Reduce carbon-emissions, air polluting toxins, atmospheric aerosol loading and ozone depletion.

– Reduce health-harming particles polluting the air, from burning fossil fuels for energy production or industrial operations.

– Reduce acid rainfall caused by sulfur dioxide released into the air by coal power plants and other carbon-emitting operations.

– Reduce air pollution from transportation vehicles and heavy machinery.

– Prevent industrial and power-plant toxic chemicals entering into the air and water.

– Prevent all forms of surface and underground water pollution.

– Safely contain and dispose all environmentally toxic substances accumulated from industrial waste and mining processes.

– Prevent container leakage of any toxic, radioactive, or other health-hazardous substances.

– Prevent industrial, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic chemicals from entering into freshwaters, bays and oceans, and into marine-life food chains.

– Prevent toxic metals from industrial & mining processes, such as mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium, asbestos, and arsenic, from entering into the air, rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers, bays and oceans, and into marine-life food chains.

– Reduce and phase-out toxic health-damaging herbicides and pesticides, that enter into the water to harm fish life, or enter into the air to harm birds and pollinators.

– Prevent agricultural chemical fertilisers, with nitrates and phosphates, entering rivers, lakes, bays and coastal waters.

– Use effective methods for human-waste containment, treatment and disposal; to prevent fecal pathogens entering drinking water, and reduce eutrophication harmful to water ecologies and fish life.

– Prevent industrial operations and power plants from disposing their excess heat into the water ecosystems of rivers, lakes, or bays.

– Prevent excessive nitrogen-rich nutrients from agricultural runoff and human waste entering rivers, lakes, estuaries, coastal waters and marinas, which kills fish and reduces water quality.

– Improve wastewater treatment of human-waste, and penalize eutrophication-causing agricultural methods that use nitrates and phosphates.

– Increase shellfish aquaculture to mitigate eutrophication.

– Prevent pollution of the rivers and oceans with plastic containers, styrofoam, and micro-plastics.

– Encourage consumer recycling of plastics and metals, and rapidly increase recycling industries, local recycling collection centres and effective recycling-separation systems; in order to minimize the amount of plastics & non-degradable products buried in landfills or discarded into rivers and oceans.

– Store non-recyclable waste-products in special landfills or safe underground containment areas.

– Monitor all kinds of air, water, and land pollution, along with the amounts of carbon added to the atmospheric greenhouse.

– Make pollution-emitting industries financially accountable, through special fines or taxes, for the degree of toxic chemicals released into the air, water or land, which harms ecosystems and negatively affects human health.

* Environmentally Responsible Economics *

Market-guiding Economic Policies

Government economic policies
should be guided by
ecological & climate needs

– Governments need to economically guide free-market activities and private investment towards achieving a healthy and sustainable natural environment.

– Create economic penalties to discourage businesses from harming the public environment, human living conditions, natural ecosystems or the global climate, and to discourage capital investment in business that engage in such harms.

– Create economic incentives to encourage capital investment in businesses and projects that help improve ecological, climate, and human living conditions. [negatively] -- protective laws, fines, and tax penalties, or [positively] -- tax breaks, rebates, subsidies, or contracts.

– Reduce industrial pollution and resource depletion by making industries economically-accountable for their environmental damages and depletion of public natural resources.

– Ensure that industrial activities are economically-accountable for any long-distance and long-term harms to the public environment and human health, to natural ecosystems and resources, to the global climate, or to local communities.

– Require multinational corporations and international financial organizations to act transparently for the good of environmental and ecological health, climate stabilization, and for improving human living conditions, sustainable communities, cities and regions.

– Create banking-regulations requiring all government-reserve protected banks to give higher loan-rating points and lower interest-rates for businesses or projects that provide current or long-term benefits to the environment or to human well-being, while giving lower loan-rating points and higher interest-rates to those businesses or projects that have negative long-term effects on the environment or to human well-being.

– In order to determine the approval-ranking of a proposed loan, as compared with other proposed loans, each proposed loan is given higher or lower loan-rating points, depending on a ratio of its environmental, human and future Benefits compared to its environmental, human and future Costs. This loan-qualifying ratio and its correlated loan-rating points can also determine the offered interest-rate for each proposed loan, in which a higher benefits-to-costs ratio determines a lower interest-rate, while a lower benefits-to-costs ratio determines a higher interest-rate.

Economic Penalties
for Environmental Harms

Business fines or tax-penalties
for damages to ecosystems or the climate

– Governments need to establish protective laws, fines, and special taxes to make businesses financially accountable for business activities that directly or indirectly cause harmful consequences to the environment, natural resources, ecosystems or climate.

– Environmental Costs (including ecological and climate-change costs, waste-disposal costs, and resource-depletion costs), due to business activities or products, must be internalized into the business' profit/costs accounting, and these environmental costs should be paid to the government or to the affected communities.

– Internalize into the selling price, the full environmental costs of sold products; thus influencing purchasing & consumption to shift towards environmentally-beneficial products.

– Climate-harming costs from carbon emissions can be paid by carbon-taxes, emission-penalties, or by a required purchasing of carbon-credits in a government directed cap-and-trade market.

Economic Incentives
for Environmental Improvements

Business tax-reductions, rebates, subsidies, or gov contracts
for improving ecosystems or reducing climate-change

– Incentivize clean and renewable energy production, clean fuels, clean energy technologies, and reliable energy infrastructure.

– Incentivize environmentally-sustainable production and consumption.

– Incentivize the development and available supply of environmentally-friendly and climate-helpful industrial technologies & consumer products.

– Incentivize the industrial use of emission-reducing and emission-capturing technologies.

– Incentivize the consumer use of environmentally-friendly and climate-helpful products.

– Incentivize the recycling and reuse of plastics, metals, and other non-degradable products, and incentivize local recycling collection systems, effective separation methods, and material-recycling businesses.

– Incentivize community projects and businesses that increase natural carbon-capture.

– Incentivize soil regeneration, organic farming, and local sustainable food production.

– Incentivize an increase, restoration, and stewardship of forests, wildlands, and nature reserves (public or private owned).

– Incentivize the ecological restoration, improvement and maintenance of coastal marine and wetland areas.

– Incentivize ocean cleanup and ocean carbon-capture projects.

– Incentivize corporate investments in natural carbon-capture projects, with tax-breaks & carbon-offset credits.

– Incentivize banks to help fund, with low-interest loans, community projects and businesses that help mitigate or reverse climate-change, improve the farming soil, or improve the local ecosystems.

– Incentivize banks to help fund, with low-interest loans, community projects and businesses that provide a needed service or benefit to a community or to the larger society.