How we can reduce our negative impacts on the world is by finding the right question to ask.

Choosing the right things to spend on doesn’t really do that, for two very good reasons.

Most money you spend will have about average impacts per dollar anyway. If you think where money goes and how each product takes so many kinds of inputs, every dollar really uses the whole economy, and on average, now produces about 1.0 lb of CO2!

Because it generates profits it also stimulates economic growth at around 3% a year, made possible by a similar increase in what we are trying to take control of in nature, per dollar. So buying expensive “green” products does more harm than cheap products by having nearly the same average impacts throughout the world, per dollar. You could buy cheaper products, but because you’d then buy more there’s no escape… either way.

Continue reading What to do… to steer our unmanageable world →

I think the answer is, well, yes of course… Most people seem to
intuitively confuse increasing their access to resources with increasing the
supply when increasing their access to resources actually decreases the earth’s
supply.

This is another way to understand the various mysterious efforts
to reduce the impacts of growth by streamlining and accelerating growth, which
of course multiplies its impacts. It basically means we are not being
self-critical and asking the hard questions. The easiest data to display the
effect with is the world energy/GDP balance:

Continue reading Does increasing resource supply accelerate depletion? →

From Jim Maendel on a Linkedin Foresight group

Phil,
[I was] just looking for smart people to join our group. After checking out your site, I believe you may be overqualified. Your stuff is brilliant. I found this portion on the market pundits fascinating, from The Bump on a Curve Notepad:

“Well, I’ve been wondering for a long time why the flows of change are so hard for people to see, and do think there’s some kind of “fixed world illusion” to contend with. There’s a list of reasons why we don’t update our information regularly and so miss the flows of change because of that.

It’s a little speculative, but another detail caught my attention recently, that even when repeated changes in “normal” are quite dramatic, people often only have to “sleep on it” to readjust and see even very short lived situations as if they were permanent and a brand new permanent “normal”.

Nearly every pundit and media source from 2007 to the present has radically changed their stories about the economic collapse nearly every week… for example.  They always seeming very comfortable with the “ever present” finality of their quickly changing stories. It’s like there’s a “reset button” that they all keep using, in their sleep, that completely hides the facts of accelerating change. Continue reading Noticing change, through the fixed world illusion →