Friday, January 08, 2010


THE GOOD NEWS:
THE MARKET IS FANTASTICALLY INEFFICIENT

Yes, that is correct: The “market system” is fantastically inefficient! [4] Our present way of distributing goods and services wastes enormous amounts of natural resources, but gigantic resource savings are possible. As an illustration, let’s make a rough estimate of per capita food energy requirements and current waste:

If we wanted our government to distribute food directly instead of using the market, how much energy would be required to produce and deliver provisions to each and every American?

Adults need about 3,000 nutritional calories of food each day. Let’s allow 30,000 calories to produce and another 3,000 calories to deliver food to every American. That’s a total of 36,000 calories per day.

Just how much energy did the American “market system” actually consume? In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 231,008 calories per day, so 231,008 minus 36,000 equals 195,008 calories wasted each day. This simple calculation suggests that Americans could be wasting something like 2 billion tonnes of oil equivalent per year! [5]That’s FAR more oil wasted than all the oil produced in the Middle East!

If we change a few of our founding beliefs and assumptions—and reorganize politically—more than enough energy remains to mitigate the worst.





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