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Once again it is a matter of zoning. Try to build something, what is the first hurdle? Zoning. Lot sizes and layouts approved long ago have contributed to income segregation and perpetuate poverty and crime. Driving 10 miles round trip in an oversized vehicle at 50mph, braking for red lights, to an under-insulated and over-conditioned box store are examples of multiple forms of energy waste resulting from modern adaptations of zoning and related regulations. The size of cars, roads and land use is standardized and coordinated. Zoning evolves just like the economy and everything else. People and governments inherit and adapt regulations.

While zoning may be to blame for all our problems it is also the solution. The year is 2018 and the U.N. reports we have 10 years to reduce 70% of global carbon emissions. Nobody knows if it is too late, but achieving these reductions would slow down the rate at which the global temperature is rising. The earth and the life force upon it are resilient and pliable and as a body heals from injury perhaps the earth can also heal.

The U.N. is already set up, and already active on the issues of global warming. It is up to the U.N. to establish a new much stronger initiative. The initiative would have to have bolder recommendations and rhetoric. It would then be up to the nations to define new regulations that would ultimately transform infrastructure.

At the root of resource depletion and environmental degradation is not entirely the appetite of the consumer but the fervor of the investor. Advertisements encourage the consumer to want and expect abundance and disregard the old for the new. All the while governments are subsidizing transportation and commerce in general. This lowers the consumer price tag but the taxpayer picks up the rest. Affordable shipping and transportation allows companies to shop the world for the lowest wages and least environmental protection. This in turn lowers our wages and erodes worker rights and environmental protections affecting the quality of life for all. Lower prices means more sales resulting in greater resource depletion and environmental degradation.

This system has been working pretty well for centuries. With the discovery of the Americas the world seemed infinite. Importing products grows new foreign markets creating more demand, more trade and greater exports. Larger companies use volume to reduce cost. Larger companies can afford to lose money in some areas cornering markets driving smaller companies out of business. These larger companies and other profiteers buy out and roll up smaller companies ultimately reducing quality and personal service. A couple of centuries of industrialization has developed into a few competing global giants. Larger volumes of cheaper products generates more waste and greater human impact. We have an economy that rewards quantity not quality.

The specific challenge is to reduce carbon emissions, mostly caused by power plants and cars but also land use. Rainforests are one of earth’s mechanisms for maintaining global atmospheric stability. Multi-national companies go into countries, bribe and even over throw governments for mining and deforestation. This displaces wildlife, local peoples and alters ecosystems and microclimates, causing civil unrest, violence and war as well as environmental degradation, drought and famine. The solutions begin with regulating land use. There it is, zoning.

Before I say zoning again I am going to throw out the argument that countries will simply not participate in U.N. zoning recommendations. They do not have to. Every country would have to decide how to apply the recommendations. Most everything is already regulated and entities vie for their best interests. Business wants less regulation. Business has capital to work with and some left over to lobby and give money to politicians who are favorable. Wildlife, forests and regular people do not have money to give to politicians. The earth and people of the future have no representation.

The bounty of the earth does not belong to us but to all the living creatures that share it, including future inhabitants such as our children and grandchildren. This is the missing factor in our economic system that generates resource depletion and environmental degradation. If you added the people and living things of the future to the “demand” side of the equation then the resources of the earth would be priceless. The earth was doing just fine for millions of years. Ships started showing up in new lands and brought rats and many other things wreaking havoc on local environments and peoples. This has been going on for a longtime and now we call it globalization. Every time we touch something we forever have to pay for it. Nature was managing the land, and then we move in and have to manage it. It would be more cost effective to leave nature alone wherever possible.

The U.N. delegates need to hire a team of specialists to draw lines around all the areas on earth that are untouched or yet relatively undamaged by human impact. The lines need to consume remote outposts and areas that can be easily reclaimed and restored. With disregard of territorial boundary, the lines would appear as small circles on the globe. Concentric circles and odd shapes would create perimeter zones meant to be vigorously restored by buying out, waiting out and seizing properties as to widen and connect the circles that could become known as earth zones, E1, E2 and E3. Designating, regulating and enforcement of the lines would be up to Nations and local governments. Roads, private property and existing land use may in most cases remain as a non-conforming use. Essentially changing nothing but future consideration of land use. This should not really upset anybody except profiteers eyeballing this land for destruction.

At the center of the largest of these zones would be the most remote and hostile regions of the world such as the tops of mountain ranges, jungles, swamps, deserts, northern Canada, Siberia and parts of Australia. Also seashores. the most formidable environment on earth, constantly changing and often difficult to develop anyway. Most of these zones would be across protected lands or national parks state forest and wildlife restoration areas. Parks are already restoring environments and limiting damage and can surely remain as tourist recreation in some limited way. Perimeter zones could accommodate recreational use, scientific data collection with limitations such as license and permitting. Native peoples living in harmony with arctic, mountain or jungle areas would remain.

E zones would be untouchable. Successive E zones would allow no new permitting for any type of permanent structures or industrial land use, including no new permits for drilling, mining or other extraction of fossil fuels. Done. This would be the point of the U.N. recommendation. We have enough fossil fuel infrastructure in place to get what we need to get through the transition to clean energy. Much of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure will have to be dismantled and the land reclaimed as we transform.

The idea of a protected zone where no new development can go will finally put an end to the idea of new frontiers for resource depletion and environmental degradation. Consumers, investors, manufacturers and developers will see limitations in future supplies of raw material. The line would not be enforceable by the U.N. but would be a strong symbolic message to nations, business and the consumer. The lines would not cost very much to draw.

The mere threat of regulation should be enough to get both investors and business to change. The threat that land and resources are not unlimited will raise the value of land and resources causing products, housing and transportation to go up. If the cost of transportation goes up then the cost of imported goods goes up. The use of imported goods will go down, and so be it. A cashmere sweater would once again be an exotic gift and German engineering may still be many a driver’s choice, costing more but adding to the allure.

Investors and retailers will scramble for localized solutions. Consumers will consume more local goods. Companies will have to train and hire local people raising wages. This will revitalize local economies. Improving neighborhoods will attract new investment and opportunity. Lower unemployment, better housing and greater opportunity are advantages that in turn can reduce crime, poverty, drug addiction and suicide.

Nations and governments are deciding whether to implement eco taxes. I don’t like the sound of it either. It is hard to pin down just who to tax. Anywhere along the processing chain you hit with a tax will still get passed along to the consumer. First end subsidization before taxation and if there must be a tax then make it a very small tax projected to grow slowly. Before the tax becomes too hurtful, alternatives will emerge. Too much eco tax would hurt struggling families. All families are struggling to make ends meet, right through middle income.

Struggling families cannot afford to fly. Lower income people don’t fly. Most don’t even have cars. They use public transportation. We are talking about upper class children getting regular trips to Disneyland. Some accommodation could be found for lower income families who must fly for family events and emergencies. Note however, that we would not have moved so many people so far from their families without jet travel and affordable fossil fuels subsidized by the taxpayer.

What is left is business class and commercial transport. So every time a local government pitches in on runway expansion or even road maintenance, it is you paying for business expenses including wining and dining in foreign lands and worse. Now consider jet cargo or diesel truckloads passing each other bound for opposite sides of the country or world!

They say you are more likely to drown in the bath tub, than crash in a plane.