Businessmen ask me; surely this environment stuff has nothing to do with me. And I say well, have you got a bank account? And they say yes. And I say well do you make deposits? Withdrawals? Do you prefer to make deposits or withdrawals? And they say definitely deposits, we want to build up the account, live off the interest and keep building the capital at all costs.
So I say okay, so what would you say if we looked at our environment as a bank? And we keep making withdrawal after withdrawal after withdrawal and make very few if any deposits. What’s going happen? And they say oh, you’ll go broke. So I say well how is that different to how you look at your business. And they say oh, I haven’t thought about it like that, maybe there’s something I need to think about and I might think about changing my behaviour.
We keep making withdrawals from this bank -our environment is our life-support system. We tend to have the economy as sort of a circle in the middle that generates everything w

Economists talk about how things are costed. At the moment, we do not cost things properly. All the things that get to us, whether they be products or the table in front of us, there isn’t a cost for how this was shipped here, the cost to our environment of chopping the tree down that made this table. All these things are not accounted for. We just have the bare minimum cost and put on a margin and off it goes to the next person who adds their margin until it finally gets to a person at the end of the line. For every bin of rubbish a household produces there are seven bins full of rubbish up the line that we never even see.
If we could cost everything properly and if that was something that we had to do and people insisted that it was done, that these externalities were costed ? that’s one of the fights we’re having in Australia now with this carbon tax; it’s an externality and people are polluting our skies and lungs for free and we all have to think about how we might be able to abs