Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Melting down to prevent a meltdown

Now that we're all hoping and praying that somehow God or Obama or the economic powers that bill will save our economy and, by extension, ourselves, maybe it's time to rethink this.

Outside the US, nobody debates global warming anymore. Like thousands of reputable scientists (including dozens of Nobel prize winners), most humans understand the cause: Humans. And we know that one thing that is absolutely, screamingly necessary is that we rapidly reduce our rate of carbon emissions, or face planetary peril.

Funny enough, this global economic meltdown may have done precisely that: Reduce our emissions by shrinking the world's economy.

Of course, the "plan" to save the world's economy involved returning to economic growth, but isn't that precisely what jeopardizes our environment?

And need I say that this "plan" assumes that, by growth, the richest people on the planet will be just so stuffed full of wealth that they will allow some of that to "trickle down" and, by accident, provide the bottom tiers of world society with just enough to live on? In other words, it's a "plan" that is sloppy and inefficient as hell, and is derived from all of the countless bullshit myths of Reagan/Thatcher-economics that is really just a giant pyramid scheme after all. Except the loser in this giant pyramid scheme, the one holding the bag, is the earth itself.

So maybe the obvious conclusion is that the sanest possible course is NOT to restart growing the economy. Maybe, what we need to do is learn how to better and more evenly distribute the wealth we currently have.

That may sound like socialism or some one world government nonsense, but that's not really the point. The point is that we need to embrace a UMOUR-centric approach to the world and allow the giant economic meltdown to occur, and then learn to live in the ashes and decaying remains, making do with what will be leftover, or face certain doom.

Let me reiterate that: Embrace UMOUR or face certain ruin!

Either that or learn to swim.

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