"Buy a Brita filter." That was my response to somebody on Twitter reacting negatively to a post where I made a point about the economic and personal impact of 70 mining jobs. Admittedly, the response was more an attempt at ironic humor, but there’s a deeper point here that often gets left out in discussions on environmental trade-offs.
While it’s true that water is a scarce resource, it is simply untrue that water is a precious resource. Potable water is sufficiently abundant today in most places where human beings live that it can be acquired at a low price. Indeed, given modern techniques for delivering and safely storing potable water, water is widely available today even in some desert areas, such as Las Vegas and Tucson.
Buffett is wrong. This isn’t the capitalist way at all. This is just the way that every economy should work. Whether communist, socialist, social democratic or capitalist, all systems will economize on the inputs of production. That is what makes us richer.
21st Century Wire says…
A request by Native American tribes seeking to halt the construction of the final link in the highly politicized and controversial Dakota Access Pipeline has been declined by a federal judge in Washington DC.
The present human condition is predicated on one of the biggest lies ever – that the economy can grow indefinitely. In a self-serving logical contortion, economists in service to the oligarchy measure the well-being of a society by how fast the economy grows, with little regard to the state of natural capital, human inequity, the welfare of ecosystems and other species, or the extent to which people and society are happy.
It used to be presented as a huge success story. We were told that in the middle of a ravished Middle East, surrounded by despair, death and pain, a land of milk and honey was shining brightly like a torch of hope.
Photo: Andre Vltchek
Or was it more like a delicious cake surrounded by rot? This exceptional place was called Iraqi Kurdistan, or officially the “Kurdistan Region.”
In recent years, a new kind of economy based on the age-old practice of sharing is flourishing across North America and Europe, and is now rapidly spreading in popularity throughout the Middle East and other world regions.
