How Stuff Works

A friend forwarded a link to a cute, well-made video online that talks about the evils of consumerism.  While I don’t know how much faith to put into the statistics that I heard (that, by the way, were positively scary), the general concepts were very cogently presented.

Bottom line: it makes a pretty strong case for us to stop buying as much as we do.  The question I have is if all the jobs that drive this consumer economy go away, what will the repercussions be for all those people who work those jobs now.  We may have to go back to being farmers of own land and weavers of our own cloth.  I previously felt that Gandhi wasn’t the most astute economist.  Perhaps he was, from a more holistic, planetary perspective.

Oh, here’s the link if you’d like to check it out:

http://www.storyofstuff.com

India and Food Prices

I recently blogged that the increased food demand in India and China had to also be a contributing factor in the increase in food prices…implying that the furore in India about President Bush’s remarks was overkill.  The world bank recently put out (inadvertently it seems) a report that analyzes this.  And the results…

Here is a link to a Yahoo news report on this.

It turns out that 75% of the increase in food prices comes from Bio fuels.  So much for all of President Bush’s remonstrations.  And yes, my hypothesis has been proven incorrect.

So then the question becomes: Are we willing to use food for energy to power machines when there isn’t a surplus of food to go around?  Seems like quite an unreasonable thing to do…the aftereffects of going green without thinking I suppose.