Good Morning out there in the real world; your King of Simple News is on the air.

G.M. is in bankruptcy, Chrysler already went bankrupt, G.E. shares have a real value of about $2.00 according to Charles Ortel, and Boone Pickens is pulling the plug on his world’s largest wind farm. And, our president is saying that recovery is just around the corner.

This is my final argument of the Show-Stopper series. Tomorrow, I will post my conclusion.

Show-Stoppers

By Mike Folkerth © 2009

TIME:

My final argument is based on the importance of “time” as an essential element when considering the lunacy of a world economy that is hopelessly dependent on exponential growth.

Most of the pundit’s that support the belief that there is no end to growth simply eliminate time (as they do the word finite), as an element for consideration in their less than convincing arguments; do not allow them to do so. Time, may in fact, be the most misunderstood element of our lives.

I’ll preface the following by first drawing attention to the habit of many politicians and economists of predicting population patterns, lifestyles, or technology as they will exist in 2050 or 2075 or some other distant date. The very nature of such long term projections demonstrates a total disconnect with time as it applies to sustainability.  

Humans have inhabited the earth for more than 30,000 years. Recorded history began some 4000 years ago. Yet it was just a little more than a100 years ago, or the single lifetime of some living humans, that we gained the ability to extract and transport natural resources in quantity.

Prior to that time, excavation and transportation of mined or otherwise harvested natural resources was extremely limited. A hundred years ago, in 1909, the first commercial flight was five years into the future, autos were a rarity, horses were still very much in use for basic transportation and farming, and electricity was available only in large cities. It is paramount to comprehend these core facts in order to clearly understand the implications that time has on determining what is sustainable or even mathematically feasible and what is not.

Consider that in just 80 years, those between 1950 and 2030, with all things remaining constant, we will have extracted the majority of earth’s non-renewable natural resources. Looking at it another way, those of us who will spend just 2 percent of recorded mans total time on earth will use the majority of all known natural resource reserves on this planet.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. While the majority of resources were used in less than 100 years, the lion’s share of that number occurred in the latter stages of the period. The usage is not linear, but exponential in nature. The more we use, the more that is required the next year to continue our growth based economy and to support our ever increasing population.

It short, should Mr. Obama be successful in his quest to convince the world that greater use of resources is the natural path to prosperity; the time period to total depletion for many critical resources could easily be reduced to a time span of less than 20 years!

At the time of this writing, the Chinese are buying up massive quantities of metals and other natural resources to ensure that they will have the majority of physical capital in the years to come. Those who currently own these critical resources are more than willing to sell for the single purpose of making short term profits.

The importance for the inclusion of time as an element of consideration for all future social planning cannot be overstated.

“You may delay, but time will not.”  – Benjamin Franklin