Recognizing that events of this week put much of our life in perspective, it is important that we continue to work toward making a high quality of life possible for all. With that in mind, we should put into perspective how our flawed, human-created system of managing and distributing scarce resources - otherwise known as a psuedo-capitalist economy - does a poor job of actually benefiting all people. It has had success in some ways, and has failed miserably in others, but the most important consideration: it is human-made and not natural. We need to improve the way our economy accounts for our natural resources and the benefits they provide us. As consumers, we need to avoid purchasing from companies that "game the system".
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use
"So how much is that costing us? Trucost’s headline results are fairly stunning.
First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 'global primary production and primary processing region-sectors' amounts to $7.3 trillion dollars a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP."
An interesting argument about eliminating the government from regulation posits that in the absence of government, industry would avoid doing things that harm people because it would not make good business sense to do so....
except that, even with government regulation, industry does plenty to harm people.
In meat tests, more data tying human illness to farm antibiotics
"EWG researchers found that 53 percent of raw chicken samples were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant E. coli. Resistant salmonella was also common on the meat samples: Of all the salmonella found on the chicken samples, some 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant. And 26 percent of the chicken tested positive for resistant Campylobacter."
Even in an era of sustaining rancor in our state and federal legislatures, we have some small amount of hope coming in the area of energy efficiency. We seem to have finally reached a point where we understand that using twice as much energy per person to deliver, at best, an equal quality of life to the rest of the developed world does not benefit the health of our people or the health of our economy.
Jeanne Shaheen, Rob Portman have high hopes for energy efficiency bill
"Among other things, the bill strengthens building codes to make new homes and buildings more efficient, creates a new Energy Department program called SupplySTAR to improve the efficiency of companies’ supply chains and requires the federal government — the country’s largest energy user — to adopt strategies to conserve the electricity used for computers."
At the same time, although concentrating wealth in the hands of few fossil-fuel-based industries has had a dragging effect on the pace of policy adoption to improve the energy industry, we see progress in the economic development of the industry for renewable energy. We need to move from the "extraction economy" to the "quality of life economy", but in that transition, we need to focus more on industries that create jobs in our cities and states to improve our communities from within.
The US solar industry puts people to work in all 50 states
"According to The Solar Foundation's (TSF) recently released interactive map, California has more solar workers than actors; more Texans work in solar than ranching; and the U.S. solar industry has more workers than the coal mining industry. Those findings and many more were discovered by The Solar Foundation team, led by Andrea Luecke, as they put together comprehensive solar job data about all fifty U.S. states and the District of Columbia."
Maybe, just maybe, we can change our relationship with "ownership" and "consumption" as sources of a high quality of life, and see more value in relationship, improvement, and time. To that end, imagine having access to a mode of transportation that would be always at the ready, would be incredibly safe and fuel efficient, and would not require you to provide maintenance or storage. This will happen in most of our lifetime...and personally, I cannot wait.
The future, coming soon: Self-driving cars mainstream by 2025
"The consensus among auto industry technologists, gathered in Detroit this week for SAE International World Congress, is that by the middle of this decade, cars that can largely pilot themselves through traffic jams will be offered for sale. By 2020, cars capable of taking over most of the work of high speed driving could debut, and by 2025, fully autonomous vehicles might hit the streets in meaningful numbers."
Happy (and safe!) Friday!
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