Juggling Dynamite

An inspiring, must read article from Jesse Ausubel, the Director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University is available via John Mauldin here this week, see: Nature Rebounds.

The below picture from the article offers a flavor of the thesis.
Technological efficiency is allowing humans to decrease consumption per capita even as our numbers have grown.

Efficiency advances in farming have also accelerated our yield per acre while decreasing our inputs of fertilizer and water.  And the most recent advances in hydroponic and vertical farming are only just beginning.  At the same time birth rates in the developed world have plateaued.

Greenspace is actually expanding as humans relinquish former farm land back to nature.

Figure 15. The smart phone as dematerializer, one small device replacing many larger ones. Credit: M. Tupy 2012.

Add to all of this a bursting of the consumer credit bubble that is sobering the west back toward more modest, efficient and sustainable trends in consumption and housing as well as on line shopping, which is dramatically reducing our need for bricks and mortar retail.  Along with simultaneous, accelerating advances in alternative and renewable fuels and water management (urged by climate change), we see that the world is in the midst of a health renaissance for us and our planet.

Top of present to do list, that thinking people are working to advance:

• continue moving off fossil fuels and pumping renewable energies to the grid
• move off combustion engines to electric motors that plug into the green grid
• start recognizing and managing water as the world’s most valuable resource
• stop using the oceans and waterways as free for the taking and begin managing, cleaning and farming them as critical resources.

A bright, sustainable future is ours for the making. But yes, change is natural evolution and essential.

Gloom, Boom & Doom Report Editor Marc Faber weighs in on why asset prices are really selling off. Hint: record global debt = stagnant global growth. Here is a direct video link.

The same investment banking types educated in the same schools have been advising the same reckless leveraging practices all over the world over the past 15 years. They have taken the same textbook strategies that rapidly grew, and then blew up Enron in 2001, and scaled it over the rest of the planet.

No surprise then, that the same debt disease has now inflicted households, companies, cities, states and countries. No blood from stones, the revelation of unpayable debts is spreading. Of course, since the first wave of crisis hit in 2007, the architects of this disaster have in large managed to download much of their own exposure onto taxpayer-backed government agencies; maniacally brilliant for them. Devastating for everyone else.

In the next phase of the crisis, it will become clear that global debt is today many trillions bigger than 2008, and our governments and central banks are completely out of bailout ability.

Puerto Rico’s Gov. Alejandro García Padilla told the NYT his island nears a “death spiral” economically, with CNBC’s Kate Kelly. Here is a direct video link.

Also see, Seniors going bankrupt in soaring numbers:

According to Statistics Canada’s most recent numbers, in 2012, 42.5 per cent of people aged 65 and over still had debt. That’s a stunning increase of 55 per cent since 1999.

Bankruptcy trustee Doug Hoyes blames the lingering debt largely on our addiction to low interest loans.

“If you’ve got decent credit, you can go out and get a mortgage for 2.5 per cent. So why not be buying the bigger house?” he says. “Today we don’t need to save because we all have a line of credit.”