The Global Economy is a Ponzi Scheme
Lester Brown has an interesting take on the unsustainable economy we live and work within.
http://www.grist.org/article/our-global-ponzi-economy/
He argues, for example, that “expensive” $3/gallon gas does not reflect the true cost of the fuel in our cars. Mr. Brown believes the cost of gas isn’t just pumping, refining, and shipping gasoline. It also includes the military cost of protecting oil in a politically unstable region, the costs incurred by climate change, subsidies to energy producers, and the health care costs of we the people breathing polluted air.
We’re overfishing our oceans, overgrazing our pastures, overpumping aquifers, and overpolluting the atmosphere to levels where the earth cannot regenerate. We are borrowing from the future in ways that an unsustainable in the long term.
This is the very same point made by Thomas Friedman in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” The planet is able to sustain a single American-sized consumption-based economy, which is profligate, wasteful, and dirty. The problem is that India and China have each created 1 America-sized economy in terms of consumption and pollution and have several more incubating. All our environment problems are going to get much worse.
A green revolution is just that: a revolution. It can’t happen piecemeal. We need to shift from a consumption-based economy to one that develops sustainable trends. This is the first time our industrial economy has faced this challenge and it flies in the face of 200 years of history.
If healthcare is hard to fix, I can’t wait to watch this fight develop in Congress and parliaments around the world.