Nicely said Ted. Pity you are going to get hammered at this site by the usual dolts - but then you are surely used to that!

Celente is predicting the "second" GFC for sometime early next year and he is looking increasingly correct (as usual). It is a pity it will all be blamed on the financial system rather than on the limits in the natural system which are, of course, the underlying, ultimate cause.

michael_in_adelaide,

The second round of the GFC is right on cue....exactly the same scenario is being played out. First volatility, followed by attempts by central banks to inject liquidity into global markets....we know how well that worked last time.....

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-1/central-banks-to-save-international-markets-from-eurozone-crisis/3705454

Yes, structural adjustments instituted by the IMF and World Bank in cahoots with third world governments often further impoverish the general population of these countries. Western countries consume 7 times the resources per hectare per capita as developing countries. The U.S., for instance, consumes the equivalent resources per hectare per person for 300 million people as would sustain 2.1 billion people in developing countries.

Deary me, another Western guilt trip article. So should the
Americans not have invented electricity, should Henry Ford not
have built his factories, because they would consume resources
that were doing absolutaly nothing at the time?

The elephant in the room is totally forgotten. At the time
of Western industrialisation, there were around a billion people
on the planet. Now there are 7 billion, heading for 10 billion.

People breeding like rabbits remains the biggest threat to
our planet, but the article does not even mention that.

Many of the resources that we consume, can in fact be recycled.
But once the bushmeat trade has wiped out most species in
Africa, those species will be lost forever. One would have
thought that they deserved a bit of our planet too, apparently
not so.

Sorry, but don't blame me if people have 5-6 kids and then have
a hunger problem.

Poirot,

The US does consume a little over 7 times as much as the Ethiopians, i.e. people in the very lowest income group, but this is not true of developing countries in general. From the Global Footprint Network 2010 Atlas, the US is respnsible for about 15% of global consumption, while all of the top billion people in the richest countries are collectively responsible for about 38%. It ought to be obvious that even if all the Americans adopted a hair shirt lifestyle that it would make relatively little difference, especially since global population is continuing to grow at 75-80 million a year. 62% of the consumption is occurring in low and middle income countries. As Paul Ehrlich once pointed out, it doesn't matter if per capita consumption is low, if there are a hell of a lot of caputs.

This graph shows energy consumption per capita in the US

http://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=graph+us+energy+consumption+per+capita

As you can see, it has been pretty flat since 1960 and is actually less than it was in the 1970s. Any growth in total energy consumption, a fairly good proxy for all consumption, has been due to population growth, mostly from immigration.

While outsiders in cahoots with local elites are more than happy to take advantage of poor, desperate people, they are not the ultimate cause of the poverty and desperation. People are poor and desperate because they live, or lived until very recently, in Malthusian trap societies where any improvements to carrying capacity are simply translated into more babies. That is what they have been doing with the enormous gains from the Haber-Bosch process and the Green Revolution, developments of those evil Westerners that doubled and in some cases tripled food production.

(cont'd)

cont'd

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to address the more wasteful forms of consumption, but it is dishonest to pretend that consumption in the rich countries is the main problem, or even the only problem, that everything would be right if we just consumed less or shared more. We are living on a planet that can sustainably support perhaps 1-2 billion people in modest comfort, but we have 7 billion and counting.The world is in 40% environmental overshoot according to the Global Footprint Network atlas, essentially because we are using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished.