The Impossible Bailout

September 30, 2008

While U.S. Lawmakers quibble over how to reward bankers and stockbrokers for their greed, stupidity and hubris, there is a far more perilous debt racking up on this planet that is utterly below the radar of most media outlets. It's the resource debt: How much humanity is consuming each year beyond the capacity of our planet to produce. Here's a nice website which explains what this is and how we are flirting with disaster in this regard.

One of the main differences between the Wall Street bailout and the resource debt or "overshoot," as it is called, is that there are always those poor saps, the U.S. taxpayers, to fall back on when the Wall Street falls apart (just please forget all those years of Wall Street preaching to us about the nearly divine form of capitalism they practice and how it is magically self-correcting and naturally just). The resource overshoot, on the other hand, has no fall-back position. There is no other verdant planet we can pillage to make up for what we are over-consuming here. There is no wiggle room, except to squeeze harder on our less fortunate bothers and sisters, which we're already doing. No, we overuse this planet and we and lose it. Period. End of species, or at least 10,000 years of civilization.

Despite this, most folks totally ignore the matter and proceed as if this small planet has unlimited resources. What else is a Hummer owner doing? What else could a gigayacht owner be doing? What other logical end is there to the irrational "Theology of Bling." Even worse, more and more people around the world even think it's just fine to hoard as much wealth (a.k.a. access to and control over resources) as they can. It's not fine, of course, because it only digs us deeper into the hole (besides being just plain vile and unethical). It's insane. It's disastrous. But it's going on at a greater and greater clip. It's the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale. This is not alarmism. It's just common sense to anyone who remembers that we live on a pale blue dot.