….follow the money!
Eric Rimmerhad said on 6/11:
“Thanks Peter – I do like your second paragraph – though there is a catch. The UK and the US and many more relatively low-birth-rate countries cannot live within the food-production capacity of the land they live in!”
To Peter Salonius’s statement on 6/11:
‘That said, there certainly is sentiment suggesting that food aid — offered to populations that have overshot the food production capacity of the land they live on – should not be lavished on people until they institute well defined programs that WILL begin to decrease their numbers toward levels that can be supported/sustained by the productive capacity of their OWN LAND.’
and
Ashok Agrwaal responding to my comment on 6/15
I find this brief analysis by Phil Henshaw far more meaningful than reams of speculative stuff churned out by Americans in general.
to my reply on 6/13 was:
Eric, Right, and the way to measure that “unaccountable” footprint on the land far away from the user is the trick, that I think I figured out. It’s using the statistical principle that most dollars can’t have way below average impact, so unless you can show it, consider your spending to have average impacts.
I think the math works out more or less like the image I had when reading the fashion magazine yesterday at the doctor’s office. There was a full page image of exquisite beauty surrounding a sea side South Hampton palace, and what popped into my mind was “an acre of undisturbed bliss in a square mile of total destruction”. There are 640 acres in a sq mile and maybe it takes a million dollar income to have one of those places.
The world energy intensity of money =6000btu/$ fairly uniformly around the world. With a 1M$ income your energy use would about equal to 2.3 acres of high performance PV solar collectors, a reasonable measure of the highest intensity mono-culture buildable. Then there’s the guesswork. What is the average renewable productivity of the total of disturbed land? If you counted all the clear cut forest, all the paved and plowed land, the scraped ocean floors and the deserts of overgrazed arid pasture, and had to take a proportional share of those… then *maybe* your share of all the unproductive waste land would pull down the average productivity of your land use to 1/250th of the highest possible efficiency use. Then you have 1 acre of bliss would be being supported by 1 square mile of destruction.
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
NY NY www.synapse9.com