Vote Sizing Institute

North Americans need to learn how to spin down, not up, to lower levels of energy use. We already have and use exponentially more energy than previous generations - yet we’re not happier, fitter or any more enlightened. The argument that we should now search for more energy to lessen our environmental impact defies logic: Hybrid cars need an incredible amount of steel, plastic, toxins, water and fossil fuel to make; nuclear energy is an idiot’s game of Russian roulette that’ll be around a looong time after we’re gone; and ethanol takes our soil, fuel and food just so we can drive farther. It seems like the mental landscape has become as depleted and polluted as the real one, and the solution is just as much to clean up our disrespectful way of thinking as to clean up our environment. Over consumption and over stimulation are not the answers.

Poorer people around the world know from experience how to get by on less stuff, reuse, recycle, use less energy, and build with nontoxic and renewable materials. Yet fishermen on all shores helplessly watch huge trawlers prowl the horizon scooping up all the ocean’s creatures; city dwellers have to dodge more and more traffic choking their streets; and farmers are displaced so their soil and water can be sucked dry to feed hamburger, caffeine and sugar junkies - all of it leaving hungry people and toxic garbage in their wakes. That shiny ring we use to show off our status took a few lakes, a mountainside, some lungs and maybe even an arm or two to produce. That new carpet and vinyl tile will scramble our brain cells for years to come and give some of us cancer. Don’t dare ask about the fur trim on that new coat. Politicians, bankers and accountants are not going to show us the way out from their ivory towers; instead we need to learn from the world’s most resourceful people how to live more satisfying lives not with newer and bigger, but more sensibly with less. This is the principle behind vote sizing - giving poorer, working and middle class people larger votes to tap into their time-tested wisdom and elect leaders who will be accountable to them - not the waste-based corporate elite.

It’s quite possible. Over the last 30 years places like California, Finland and Japan have maintained or reduced their energy consumption while growing their economies. Atlanta, on the other hand, looks like it might run out of water any day. If our environment was an open system, we could keep deferring the costs to the next fiscal period ...but it’s not and we shouldn’t. Sooner or later we’re going to have to pay the fiddler. If we don’t learn from the billions of our poorer, working and middle class people how to slow down; then very soon just having a planet to call home might be unaffordable for all of us. Besides, humans are at their best when they collectively solve problems through democratic reforms like vote sizing; not when they selfishly cause them.

The problem is not only that as a species per capita we over consume; but also that we over populate. Poorer and working class people all over the world are having too many children. By 2050, the world's 50 poorest countries will have tripled their populations, and there will be nearly 9 billion mouths to feed, minds to occupy, cousins to visit, etc. The reason for overpopulation is the massive political disenfranchisement that, poorer, working and middle class people undergo, and so they wrap themselves up in extended families and tribes. Vote sizing, by giving these people a real voice through a weighted vote, offers instead authentic participation and inclusion; and should therefore result in a sharing of responsibilities and reluctance to over burden the system with offspring.

Resourcefulness, coupled with lower population, is the only way out of our jam. Vote sizing clears through all the spin to get at the simple truth that to keep moving forward we all need to have a say in the outcome. Don’t fall for those flashy cartoon nuclear power plants and open-roaded hybrid tv commercials to help; instead get yourself a weighted vote and let's all figure out how to slow the hell down. Please.