BBC News – Is the global economy headed for the rocks?
I have long been fascinated with a simultaneously bleak and optimistic notion. What if maximizing greed and profit taking is the ultimate green agenda? What if political moves towards egalitarianism and conservation are the worst thing worried planet watchers need to worry about?
The point is this: If wealth and prosperity are spread around in anything approaching an equitable fashion the outcome will be more consumption and production. Part of this will be because more people will be born, and part because some of the 3 or 4 billion people presently eking out an existence will do better, and add this 'doing better' to the sum total of energy and resources consumed and pollutants generated.
On this Malthusian-tinged projection, the only chance civilization has is to let regressive economic machinations run their course fairly, perhaps even democratically, so that the global Ponzi scheme will be seen to have been conducted with everyone having had a fair kick at the can.
This could explain why 'the establishment' is so concerned that sports be conducted honourably without drugs. Of all the tropes human being have invented, nothing has been more seditious than the sporting world's claim that competition is everything and that people can and should be sorted into a few winners and lots of losers.
Drug free, fair competitions mean that losers have no alternative but to be a good sport about the results.
In other words, from the point of view of Bill Gates and his peers, economic globalization means that that, at the end of the day, the final totting up will include human beings everywhere.
We will all perceive that the ultimate sport has been proceeding fairly: almost everyone is a loser, and losers have a moral obligation to be a good sport about it!
Problem solved! Human beings' environmental footprint becomes manageable because the 50% on $2 a day life-styles becomes 80% - and they think this is nothing more than they deserve!
Survivability and peace in our time! - what's not to like?