Resource Depletion Quotes

The social phenomenon of economic growth is, thanks to the principle of the conservation of matter, nothing other than the physical phenomenon of increasing resource depletion.

Trust is a peculiar resource; it is built rather than depleted by use.

Now vampirism is contagious; the person who is vampirised, being depleted of vitality, is a psychic vacuum, himself absorbing form anyone he comes across in order to refill his depleted resources of vitality.

There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.

The Exhaustion Funnel. The narrowing area of the circles illustrates the narrowing of life as we give up the things in life that we enjoy but seem "optional." The result is that we stop doing activities that would nourish us, leaving only work or other stressors that often deplete our resources.

They will also tell you how far along we are along the depletion curve; the optimists among them will even claim that there is nothing to worry about, because we have two or three decades of production left at the current level. It is to be expected that we will run out of fossil fuels before we run out of optimists, who are, along with fools and madmen, a renewable resource.

obedience has a way of strengthening rather than depleting our resources. If we obey in one small corner, we will have power to obey elsewhere. Obedience begets obedience.

… what right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity’s environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries’ consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world’s resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?

So mankind gobbled in a century all the world’s resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence—and still breeding without control. So I say the time has come to stand up and be counted.

Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

Love is more than a cultural ideal; it is a social foundation for the self. Yet, the cultural resources that make it constitutive of the self have been depleted.

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert...Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust

Since my symptoms began 13 years ago, I’ve tried every form of pain management I could access — NSAIDS, nonopioid analgesics, neurologic medications, acupuncture, laser therapy, physical therapy, prolotherapy, massage, and trigger-point injections. Most of these have been unhelpful; others provide temporary relief, often at great expense. At the end of the day, when my body is fully depleted of its resources and in the most pain, a single dose of Percocet is the only tool that silences the pain enough for me to fall asleep. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if Percocet became unavailable to me, and the very thought scares me. I’ve been taking it for five years. To avoid any chance of addiction, I only take it at night and have stayed on a consistently low dose.

At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market

Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste. The pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 17, the

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one’s resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has the give - like milk in the breast.

Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success; it takes away from my own depleted emotional resources. It is an imposition in every way. To some of us, it is an inconvenience from which we unashamedly run. We have become experts in maintaining a grand scope of friendships and amateurs in genuine intimacy and care. Unwittingly, we have sacrificed everything on the altar of self-sufficiency—only to discover that we have sold our souls to isolation.

Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.

interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk.

What I thought we might have a conversation about, is basically I do math, sir, not clandestine operations that severely deplete my mental resources.

The psychologist Roy Baumeister has shown that willpower is a limited resource, so we have to be careful not to deplete it.

People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.

Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources.

No one can save time. It’s not like money. You can’t deposit the time you save into an account and use it later. Time passes. Time is a constantly depleting resource. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and you will NEVER get it back.

Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. It wasn’t the sugar in the lemonade but the belief in its impact that gave participants an extra boost.

Every day, without realizing it, we engage in all manner of activities that diminish our willpower. Willpower is depleted when we make decisions to focus our attention, suppress our feelings and impulses, or modify our behavior in pursuit of goals. It’s like taking an ice pick and gouging a hole in our gas line. Before long we have willpower leaking everywhere and none left to do our most important work. So like any other limited but vital resource, willpower must be managed.

At a private lunch when I recently asked one of the world’s highest-ranking international diplomats what, among all the possible scenarios for Pakistan, was the most positive vision she held, everyone around the table laughed nervously. This diplomat was surprisingly honest. She admitted that she had not one positive vision for Pakistan. She was candid about a view that leaders widely hold but seldom acknowledge: humanity is on a slippery slope of resource depletion. It is unlikely leaders can do anything about it. Hence, their job is to make sure their people will lose last. This means securing for their people enough resources from the globe’s diminishing resource pie to ensure that their nation will float even if others sink. From this vantage point, money shields a population from losing first. Leaders beholden to this view therefore embrace even more vigorously GDP growth as their key objective; the financial advantage will allow their constituency to stay just a bit further ahead of the others in the resource race to 2052.

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belonds to that natural order of giving that seems to renew iself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give - like milk in the breast... Even purposeful giving must have some source that refills it. The milk in the breast must be replenished by food taken into the body. If it is [our] function to give, [we] must be replenished too. But how? Every person should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.

Governmental programs are often faceless and unsustainable. Handouts create more dependency in the populace, decreasing overall societal productivity and depleting the resources of the agencies providing the handouts. The taxpayer base decreases, the dependent population increases, and taxpayer money runs out.

I had to find Mr. Brentwood. And I had to save him. Zeus, Inc. had saved the world 50 years ago when we had depleted our energy resources. The very same Zeus, Inc. that now powered a majority of the known world. And that power had come from the man himself. Without him? We would all be plunged into total darkness, knocked back to the literal dark ages. Chaos could and probably would ensue.

Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so.

When doing battle, seek a quick victory. A protracted battle will blunt weapons and dampen ardor. If troops lay siege to a walled city, their strength will be exhausted. If the army is exposed to a prolonged campaign, the nation’s resources will not suffice.4 When weapons are blunted and ardor dampened, strength exhausted and resources depleted, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of these complications.5

How could a superstition be true? Maybe “superstition” was what snuck into the gaps, the cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, “I’ll take it from here. You’ve had your shot.

The current demonization of Russia will be used, and is indeed being used"..."to justify unjust wars that destroy the lives of poor people abroad; to sacrifice the lives of our poor, who are largely recruited into the armed force for economic reasons; to deplete this country's rich resources on the continental build-up of our over-bloated military to the detriment of much-needed infrastructure and social spending; and to greatly increase our carbon foot print.

All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint. That’s why most of those solutions remain just good ideas. That’s also why we will probably hit the wall, and why the outcomes described in the previous chapters of this book are likely. The sustainability revolution will occur. The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis.

Any people can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems that we shall consider later in this book: that the resources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels between years or decades; that it’s difficult to get people to agree on exercising restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons, to be discussed in later chapters); and that the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation

For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.

Fatigue also depletes frontal resources. As the workday progresses, doctors take the easier way out, ordering up fewer tests, being more likely to prescribe opiates (but not a nonproblematic drug like an anti-inflammatory, or physical therapy). Subjects are more likely to behave unethically and become less morally reflective as the day progresses, or after they’ve struggled with a cognitively challenging task. In an immensely unsettling study of emergency room doctors, the more cognitively demanding the workday (as measured by patient load), the higher the levels of implicit racial bias by the end of the day.[27

This is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing. By 2050, some studies predict, there will be more plastic waste in the sea than fish, measured in weight. The oceans are despoiled and depleted because most governments have neither the inclination nor the resources to protect them. It is hard enough to get the public’s attention about the dangers of global warming, even as the effects of it become clear, including hotter temperatures, rising seas, and more severe storms. But dwindling fish stocks? They hardly register.

Throughout history whole societies have committed ecological suicide using the very same tactics we employ today: namely, a highly productive agriculture based on short-term profits, a dependence on hierarchical systems for essential resources, and an arrogant disregard for environmental stewardship. The current trends of depleted groundwater, climate change, and destruction of the aquatic environment (so necessary to renew the water cycle) tell us that we too travel down the very same road of ancient civilizations before us, toward extinction. But first—and soon—will come the day when clean water is still available, though only to the elite few who can pay the price. One out of twenty people relies on privately owned water

Some feel absolutely incapable of ever saying no to other people, even though they know that to say yes means that their own resources will be taxed to the limit or beyond. They feel guilty doing something for themselves or having plans of their own. They are always ready to serve others at the expense of themselves, not because they have transcended their own physical and psychological needs and have become saints, but because they believe that that is what they “should” do to be a “good person.” Sad to say, this often means that they are always helping other people but feel incapable of nourishing or helping themselves. That would be too “selfish,” too self-centered. Thus, they put other people’s feelings first, but for the wrong reasons. Deep down they may be running away from themselves by serving other people, or they may be doing it to gain approval from others or because they were taught and now think that that is the way to be a “good person.” This is a kind of faux selflessness. This behavior can create enormous stress because you are not replenishing your inner resources, nor are you aware of your attachments to the role you have adopted. You can exhaust yourself running around “doing good” and helping others, and in the end be so depleted that you are incapable of doing any good at all and unable to help even yourself. It’s not the doing things for others that is the source of the stress here. It is the lack of peace and harmony in your mind as you engage in doing all the doing.

The environmental thought leaders’ opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing human life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their opposition is a consistent attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, unaltered nature. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs. If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.

In the very beginning of life, you were acquainted with the exquisite natural resources of your breath, body, and inner life. You breathed deeply into your belly. You loved your body. You were in touch with the wisdom within your own life. Over time, however, the girl-child becomes disconnected from the “home” within her. Caught in the swirls of others, twisted in the shapes of others, depleted by the demands of others, she becomes outer-directed and loses touch with herself. Her breath becomes shallow. She ignores her body. She looks to saviors outside of herself for salvation and validation, forgetting the rich resources within her. In the fullness of time, we become dizzy from swirling; our lives ache from being twisted out of shape; and our spirits become depleted from servicing others with our energy and attention. Weary, we reach out to a counselor, spiritual community, or self-help group. We are offered information, insight, and tools of support. We are inspired by the experience, strength, and hope of others who are turning toward their own lives with vulnerability, courage, and truth. Insight, information, and camaraderie point us in the right direction, but the journey begins as we turn toward our own lives and look within to re-connect to our natural resources: breath, woman-body, and inner life. Home is always waiting. It is as near as a conscious breath, conscious contact with your woman-body, and a descent into the abundant resources of your inner life. The meaning, recovery, and transformation you seek ‘out there’ is found within your own heart, mind, body, and life. It is accessed in the present moment and released into your experience with each mindful breath. Return home often—you have everything you need there.

No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforestation and the abuse of the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions—all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners, conquering its neighbors and competitors, capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy.

Throughout the past few millennia there have been great advances in technology which have raised standards of living in many areas of the world. At the same time, we have reduced our standard of life: our quality of air, purity of rivers and oceans, wellness of the land; and we have increased world hunger, extinction of whole species of animals, depletion of natural resources. Improved technology is not leading to greater peace and harmony among nations, between individuals, even within the self. The patriarchal world is out of balance. The worship of the male energy has led to rape of our natural resources and poisoning of our environment. What is missing, particularly in Western culture, is respect for an energy which makes things whole, an energy which honors life. The goddesses provide a clue how we must restructure our world if it is to survive, a clue both to our past and to our future. The fact that there were powerful goddesses disproves the claim that woman has ‘always’ been powerless and secondary, and that this ‘second rank’ is thus a natural phenomenon. This frees us to move into a balancing.

After basic needs are met, higher incomes produce gains in happiness only up to a point, beyond which further increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being. The cumulative impact of surging per capita consumption, rapid population growth, human dominance of every ecological system, and the forcing of pervasive biological changes worldwide has created the very real possibility, according to twenty-two prominent biologists and ecologists in a 2012 study in Nature, that we may soon reach a dangerous “planetary scale ‘tipping point.’ ” According to one of the coauthors, James H. Brown, “We’ve created this enormous bubble of population and economy. If you try to get the good data and do the arithmetic, it’s just unsustainable. It’s either got to be deflated gently, or it’s going to burst.” In the parable of the boy who cried wolf, warnings of danger that turned out to be false bred complacency to the point where a subsequent warning of a danger that was all too real was ignored. Past warnings that humanity was about to encounter harsh limits to its ability to grow much further were often perceived as false: from Thomas Malthus’s warnings about population growth at the end of the eighteenth century to The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by Donella Meadows, among others. We resist the notion that there might be limits to the rate of growth we are used to—in part because new technologies have so frequently enabled us to become far more efficient in producing more with less and to substitute a new resource for one in short supply. Some of the resources we depend upon the most, including topsoil (and some key elements, like phosphorus for fertilizers), however, have no substitutes and are being depleted.

When we reflect on our daily lives, we might look back at a day that was very stressful and think, “Well, that wasn’t my favorite day this week.” When you’re in the middle of one of those days, you might long for a day with less stress in it. But if you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you. You may have spared yourself some discomfort, but you will also have robbed yourself of some meaning. And yet, it’s not at all uncommon to wish for a life without stress. While this is a natural desire, pursuing it comes at a heavy cost. In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Avoiding stress can also be isolating. In a study of students at Doshisha University in Japan, the goal to avoid stress predicted a drop, over time, in their sense of connection and belonging. Having such a goal can even exhaust you. For example, researchers at the University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. One particularly impressive study conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California, followed more than one thousand adults for ten years. At the beginning of the study, researchers asked the participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade. They also experienced increasing conflict at work and at home, and more negative outcomes, such as being fired or getting divorced. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. The more firmly committed you are to avoiding stress, the more likely you are to find yourself in this downward spiral. As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.

It was discussed and decided that fear would be perpetuated globally in order that focus would stay on the negative rather than allow for soul expression to positively emerge. As people became more fearful and compliant, capacity for free thought and soul expression would diminish. There is a distinct inability to exert soul expression under mind control, and evolution of the human spirit would diminish along with freedom of thought when bombarded with constant negative terrors. Whether Bush and Cheney deliberately planned to raise a collective fear over collective conscious love is doubtful. They did not think, speak, or act in those terms. Instead, they knew that information control gave them power over people, and they were hell-bent to perpetuate it at all costs. Cheney, Bush, and other global elite ushering in the New World Order totally believed in the plan mapped out by artificial intelligence. They were allowing technology to dictate global control. “Life is like a video game,” Bush once told me at the rural multi-million dollar Lampe, Missouri CIA mind control training camp complex designed for Black Ops Special Forces where torture and virtual reality technologies were used. “Since I have access to the technological source of the plans, I dictate the rules of the game.” The rules of the game demanded instantaneous response with no time to consciously think and critically analyze. Constant conscious disruption of thought through television’s burst of light flashes, harmonics, and subconscious subliminals diminished continuity of conscious thought anyway, creating a deficit of attention that could easily be refocused into video game format. DARPA’s artificial intelligence was reliant on secrecy, and a terrifying cover for reality was chosen to divert people from the simple truth. Since people perceive aliens as being physical like them, it was decided that the technological reality could be disguised according to preconceptions. Through generations of genetic encoding dating back to the beginning of man, serpents incite an innate autogenic response system in humans to “freeze” in terror. George Bush was excited at the prospects of diverting people from truth by fear through perpetuating lizard-like serpent alien misconceptions. “People fear what they don’t know anyway. By compounding that fear with autogenic fear response, they won’t want to look into Pandora’s Box.” Through deliberate generation of fear; suppression of facts under the 1947 National Security Act; Bush’s stint as CIA director during Ford’s Administration; the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination; secrecy artificially ensured by mind control particularly concerning DARPA, HAARP, Roswell, Montauk, etc; and with people’s fluidity of conscious thought rapidly diminishing; the secret government embraced the proverbial ‘absolute power that corrupts absolutely.’ According to New World Order plans being discussed at the Grove, plans for reducing the earth’s population was a high priority. Mass genocide of so-called “undesirables” through the proliferation of AIDS4 was high on Bush’s agenda. “We’ll annihilate the niggers at their source, beginning in South and East Africa and Haiti5.” Having heard Bush say those words is by far one of the most torturous things I ever endured. Equally as torturous to my being were the discussions on genetic engineering, human cloning, and depletion of earth’s natural resources for profit. Cheney remarked that no one would be able to think to stop technology’s plan. “I’ll destroy the planet first,” Bush had vowed.

Yes, there are still “explosionists” concerned that an overpopulated planet will deplete the earth’s resources, but they now share the stage with “implosionists” troubled by a world of too few young supporting too many old.

An unknown author said, “Trust is a peculiar resource; it is built rather than depleted by use.” Trust is something that takes time to build, can be lost in seconds, and may be our most important and most difficult objective in managing our relationships.

There can be a reserve demand for a depletable resource, just as there is speculative reserve demand for any other stock of goods on the market. This speculation is not simple wickedness, however; it has a definite function, namely, that of allocating the scarce depletable resource to those uses at those times when consumer demand for them will be greatest. The speculator, waiting to use the resources until a future date, benefits consumers by shifting their use to a time when they will be more in demand than at present.

One of the frequent attacks on the behavior of the free market is based on the Georgist bugbear of natural resources held off the market for speculative purposes. We have dealt with this alleged problem above. Another, and diametrically opposite, attack is the common one that the free market wastes resources, especially depletable resources. Future generations are allegedly robbed by the greed of the present. Such reasoning would lead to the paradoxical conclusion that noneof the resource be consumed at all. For whenever, at any time, a man consumes a depletable resource (here we use “consumes” in a broader sense to include “uses up” in production), he is leaving less of a stock for himself or his descendants to draw upon. It is a fact of life that wheneverany amount of a depletable resource is used up, less is left for the future, and therefore anysuch consumption could just as well be called “robbery of the future,” if one chooses to define robbery in such unusual terms. Once we grant any amount of use to the depletable resource, we have to discard the robbery-of-the-future argument and accept the individual preferences of the market. There is then no more reason to assume that the market will use the resources too fast than to assume the opposite. The market will tend to use resources at precisely the rate that the consumers desire.

For years I’ve been waiting for nature to react to our environmental bullshit, tell us to stop overpopulating and depleting resources, to shut up and stop messing around and just die. Species-level apoptosis. I think this could be the final warning—a real species killer.

Wikipedia: Tragedy of the commons In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.

No, these individuals have had their fill. They depleted the resources of communication amongst themselves. It no longer offered excitation. They wanted a tryst, a midnight rendezvous, to be tongue-tied for an evening, not having to worry about puritanical appearances, acceptable behavior, placing place settings and feeding their children with cherubic faces. Trading paradisiacal palisades of their guarded community, the spiritless suburbia for subterranean devilry. These were philistines, not patrons of the arts. They merely wanted escapism. A stranger to fill their heads. A morally corrupt stand-up comic delivering the goods: immorality, immodesty, and obscenity. Food for thought, nutritive to their stale lives. Perhaps something they could even discuss behind locked doors, back in the privacy of their safe, secure homes.

By current estimates, at least 50 per cent of North Americans do not consume the daily recommended amounts of magnesium. Changes in farming practices over the years are partly to blame. The magnesium content of vegetables, a rich source of the mineral, has declined by 80 to 90 per cent over the last hundred years. As far back as the 1930s, the alarm was being raised about the growing scarcity of magnesium and other minerals in food. The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them. The processing of food further depletes already scare magnesium, and ultra-processed foods that make up such a high proportion of modern diets in North America are seriously lacking in magnesium. To add to the problem, the mineral is depleted by many widely used prescription medications. But a major factor impacting magnesium status is the significant and rapid loss of the mineral from the body due to stress. All types of stress - workplace stress, exam stress, emotional stress, exposure to excessive noise, the stress of extreme physical activity or chronic pain, the stress of fighting infections - are known to be a serious drain on magnesium resources. The interaction of magnesium with stress works in two ways: while stress depletes magnesium, the deficiency itself increases anxiety and enhances uncontrolled hormonal response to stress. This creates a vicious feedback loop whereby stress depletes magnesium, but the ensuing magnesium deficiency further exacerbates stress.

knowing that willpower is not a limited resource, depleted by effort, makes you have more of it.

The idea here is that we have only a limited amount of self-control or willpower to draw on, and when our reserves are drained we have a harder time resisting temptation. Fatigue, mental strain, stress, and hunger can all work as drains on our self-control resources.48 Research shows that stigma or the threat of rejection can also reduce self-control through ego depletion,49 so stereotype threat can be a trigger for overspending if you use retail therapy. However our egos get worn down, the effect is the same: We have less self-control. So, when we are ego depleted, just trying harder to resist temptation will only work against us, making us more tired and more ego depleted. Instead, if we want to resist the temptation to shop when our egos are drained, the solution is not to be hard on ourselves, but to focus on replenishing our resources. This is where affirmations come in.

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out of gumption. And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource—individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.

be “self-control fatigue,” or as he coined it, ego depletion. These studies led Baumeister to argue that self-control is a limited resource.

The trick of switching words’ meanings is one of the oldest in the book. Just think of “freedom” and “democracy” … Ultimately, it’s a problem of shortsightedness. An addiction to what’s next. People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up. Fabricate the “news.” Invent their own “analysis.” We’ve been doing that for years. It seems only natural that eventually we’d move on to manufacturing words.… But Synchronic didn’t invent accelerated obsolescence. As a nation we’ve been practicing mass production since before World War II. We believed wastefulness would morph, by magic, into wealth. That if we created enough disposable products, it would help fire consumerism. And it did, for a while. But here’s a dirty secret: resources are finite. Waste enough, and eventually it’s all used up. Language, too. You can’t just coin a word, use it once, and toss it out. But language is just the latest casualty. We always think there’s more of everything, even as we deplete it. Not just petroleum or gold, glacial ice or water, bandwidth. Now even our thoughts and memories are disposable.

But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the “Is Earth f**ked” question, he set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”4 There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as “resistance”—movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.” Such mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement—represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control.5

Unlike in the workplace, there’s also less pressure in a quiet home environment to multitask. While we like to believe that we’re good at multitasking, research suggests it’s rarely an effective strategy. What appears to us as tackling several activities at once often involves simply shuffling between tasks, for which there are serious consequences. When we multitask, our performance suffers, and our stress levels spike. In part, it’s because redirecting our attention from one task to another depletes our cognitive resources, leaving us with less mental energy than if we had simply devoted our full attention to one activity at a time. Researchers are also finding that chronic multitaskers—those of us who can’t help but read e-mails while talking on the phone, for example—are especially prone to experiencing boredom, anxiety, and depression.

Outside the Republican Convention hall, there were plenty of people who did not feel 400 percent bigger and more hopeful in 1900. Although the ferment over silver had died down, the impetus for social change and radical reform had not. Progressive activists and journalists were beginning to focus national attention on the widening gap between rich and poor, on the problems of cities, political corruption, the rights of women, the depletion of natural resources, continuing racial inequality, and the power of big business. The new Governor of Wisconsin, Republican reformer Robert M. La Follette, gained national prominence pledging to

I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.

Living nonextractively does not mean that extraction does not happen: all living things must take from nature in order to survive. But it does mean the end of the extractivist mindset—of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration. Even such traditionally destructive practices as logging can be done responsibly, as can small-scale mining, particularly when the activities are controlled by the people who live where the extraction is taking place and who have a stake in the ongoing health and productivity of the land. But most of all, living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated: deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing strength of the sun, wind, and waves; our metals from recycled and reused sources.

Coming to our senses involves cultivating an overarching awareness of all our senses, including our own minds, and their limitations, including the temptation when we feel deeply insecure and have a lot of resources, to try to control as rigidly and as tightly as possible all variables in the external world, an impossible and ultimately depleting, intrinsically violent,

Coming to our senses involves cultivating an overarching awareness of all our senses, including our own minds, and their limitations, including the temptation when we feel deeply insecure and have a lot of resources, to try to control as rigidly and as tightly as possible all variables in the external world, an impossible and ultimately depleting, intrinsically violent, and self-exhausting enterprise.

global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response.

Sleeplessness is the state in which producing, consuming, and discarding occur without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and the depletion of resources." -24/7

1. Investors give fund managers money at the wrong time. Now that you’ve had some time to read this book and understand the importance of buying stocks during fear cycles and holding during greed cycles, this first indicator should make sense. To understand this principle, imagine that you’re the fund manager of a $100 billion investment fund. When the stock market crashes and you’re able to purchase severely undervalued businesses with minimal debt, not only do you lack funds to invest, but all your resources are being depleted by scared investors. Instead of receiving money to buy the great deals, your investors are selling their shares in the fund and you don’t have the capacity to take advantage of the market behavior. This reason alone severely handicaps fund managers as they attempt to beat the market.

That’s what is meant by the tragedy of the commons. A bunch of individuals, acting independently and out of self-interest, may deplete a shared resource even though it hurts everyone in the long run. It applies to corporations that externalize costs such as pollution, but it’s what happens when net users illegally download music and movies, expecting others to pick up the tab. It is in each person’s short-term self-interest to steal the music. Only the sucker pays. But when everyone thinks that way, there’s no one left to pay for the musician, and the music stops altogether. The individualistic act of stealing the music or depleting the resource is a form of compression, robbing from the future to enjoy something in the present at no cost. As long as we live as individuals, the distant future doesn’t really matter so much. The philosophy of the long now would suggest that the only way to see past this immediate, consumer-era self-satisfaction is to look further in the future. Have kids. Once we see that our long-term self-interest is no longer served, we may all, individually, change our behaviors. Even if we are thinking selfishly, prioritizing “me in the long run” isn’t quite so bad as “me right now.

The most important principle in your relationship with time is that time is perishable. No one can save time. It’s not like money. You can’t deposit the time you don’t use into an account and use it later. Time passes. Time is a constantly depleting resource. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and you will never get it back.

MAY 7 Let God Increase Your Strength He gives power to the faint and weary, and to him who has no might He increases strength [causing it to multiply and making it to abound]. ISAIAH 40:29 When I feel myself starting to get weary, I go to the Lord. I have learned it’s better to keep up regular maintenance than to wait until a breakdown occurs and then try to repair the damage. It is wise not to use up everything you have and totally deplete all your resources—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s easy to get burned out from overwork or just being continually upset and frustrated about problems, especially when you focus on them rather than keeping your eyes on the Lord. Don’t rely on yourself and your own strength and abilities. God has promised to provide the strength, energy, and power you need to keep going. So learn to relax more and allow the Lord to restore and renew you before you start falling apart. Come apart daily and spend quality time with Jesus.

As is the case with other free things, the lack of a price signal to modulate our consumption will lead us to consume too much, until we deplete the resource at hand.

Although the traditional concept of recycling had long since been popularized and accepted by the mainstream as basic civic responsibility, its benefits did not always hold up under close scrutiny since the amount of energy and other resources that went into the various processes—and all of the detrimental by-products that resulted—very legitimately called the entire theory into question. The reality of traditional consumer recycling was that it yielded a slender margin of benefit at best, and at worst, might have actually done a great deal of harm, representing little more than a psychological placebo designed to alleviate collective guilt over massive amounts of unfettered overconsumption, thereby accelerating the pace of global resource depletion. But once the question of energy (and

One of the standing examples of Gujarat strides in solar power is the Charanka Solar Power Generation Park in North Gujarat which was raised in just one year. The park, which is today Asia’s biggest single-point solar generation facility, produces 225 MW of solar power by 22 private producers who have invested Rs 3400 crores in the park. A work force of 5,000 worked on it for 1 year during peak hours everyday. Says D.J. Pandian, Gujarat’s Energy Secretary: ‘Charanka is a shining example of Gujarat’s enterprise and efficiency.’ What is more, the governance in the energy sector is not marked by just goal setting and achieving. It is a reflection of farsightedness of a rare kind that isn’t visible elsewhere in India. It is best demonstrated in its steps to control the depleting water table with an eye on future. In an age in which populism and vote-bank politics are the norm in Indian democracy, the Modi Government has purposely kept the supply of agriculture power to 8 hours though it can afford to give more power with an eye on rural votes, power being surplus now. The reason is simple, the more the power to the farm sector, the greater the exploitation of groundwater by farmers wanting to earn more by producing more. Striking this fine balance between the farmers’ needs and balancing the natural resources is seen as a fine example of precise planning and farsighted governance free of populism. Interestingly, Modi has been able to maintain this balance even in the face of electoral pressures. In 2012, an election year, the Modi Government did allow new bore connections to farmers in 40 banned tehsils but with a rider: those taking new connections would have to adopt drip or sprinkler method of irrigation which consumes less water and therefore less power.

Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.” For me, the most powerful keystone habit has been sleep. Once I changed the amount of sleep I was getting, and started regularly getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night, other habits, such as meditation and exercise, became easier. Willpower alone is not enough. As a number of psychological studies have shown, willpower is a resource that gets depleted the more it’s used.

Mainstream economists habitually treat asset depletion as income, while ignoring the value of the assets themselves. If the owner of an old-growth forest cuts it and sells the timber, the market may record a drop in the land’s monetary value, but otherwise the ecological damage done is regarded as an externality. Irreplaceable biological assets, in this case, have been liquidated; thus the benefit of these assets to future generations is denied. From an ecosystem point of view, an economy that does not heavily tax the extraction of non-renewable resources is like a jobless person rapidly spending an inheritance.

What’s ironic is that the party decrying the Death Tax is also the party of hard work and self-reliance. They hate freeloaders and welfare queens. So, why are they so outraged over the prospect that there might be a few less over-privileged little shits in the world? They don’t seem to be worried about the depletion of our natural resources, climate change, erratic weather patterns, rising sea levels, diminishing water supplies, polluted water, polluted air, rampant wild fires, gun violence, and fracking, but they’re flipping out over the notion that our American way of life will disappear if we choke off our supply of Paris Hiltons. The

In introducing technical innovations, or using energy in novel ways, or developing alternative sources of power, we are not subjecting ‘society’ to some new external influence, or conversely using social forces to alter an external reality called ‘nature’. We are reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point. These entanglements, however, are not recognised in our theories of collective life, which continue to divide the world according to the conventional divisions between fields of specialist knowledge. There is a natural world studied by the various branches of natural science, and a social world analysed by the social sciences. Debates about human-induced climate change, the depletion of non-renewable resources, or any other question, create political uncertainty not so much because they reach the limits of technical and scientific knowledge, but because of the way they breach this conventional distinction between society and nature.

When we do not sleep enough or when we are tired or exhausted, for example after a day of work in an open office, it is our reflecting brain that is tired and it is our cognitive resources that are depleted. This is even visible in brain scans where we can see that the part of the brain that moderates the emotional brain is too sleepy to do its job. [321] This not only has a negative impact on the quality of our thinking, but since our reflecting brain then has difficulties regulating our emotional reflex brain our emotions become more primitive and exaggerated, we become over-reactive, over-emotional towards negative stimuli and are much less able to see negative things in their proper context. It also leads to a decrease in emotional intelligence in general and less socially intelligent behavior, due to a lessening of our intrapersonal awareness, interpersonal skills, emotion management, empathy and moral judgment. [322] A well-researched aspect is that with a lack of sleep we have greater difficulties appraising emotional facial expressions, [323] which of course reduces our ability to react in an emotionally and socially intelligent way.

Nature has designed the human body to maintain its reproductive sexual potency at all costs, in order to ensure the propagation of the species. Therefore, whenever sexual essence and energy are depleted, especially in the male immediately after ejaculation, the body promptly tries to restore sexual potency by producing more sperm, semen, and sexual hormones. If any of the vital nutrients required for this task are missing or deficient, which is often the case, the body 'borrows' them from other organs, glands, and tissues, particularly from the cerebrospinal fluid and sexual glands. Sexual excess therefore causes a constant drain of vital nutrients and hormones from the brain, spine, and adrenals as the body struggles to maintain sexual potency and fertility. This is primarily a male problem, because only the male of the species loses his potent semen-essence during intercourse. Nature has designed the female in such a way that sexual activity does no deplete her vital resources, thereby ensuring her ability to nourish and protect her offspring.

So mankind gobbled in a century all the world’s resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence

Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress. The same goes for verbalization.

Focusing helps us avoid mental overload, but it can also deplete our attention system. When we focus on one task for a long period of time or particularly intensely, our ability to stay focused declines. That is one of the reasons why schoolchildren get recess and writers take breaks: Directing and controlling our attention is difficult and tiresome. It doesn’t require a long day of school or intense work to exhaust the resources of our attention system. The brain can run down more rapidly than you might expect.

The catastrophe that lies in wait for us is not connected to a depletion of resources. Energy itself, in all its forms, will become more and more abundant (at any rate, within the broadest time frame that could conceivably concern us as humans). Nuclear energy is inexhaustible, as are solar energy, the force of the tides, of the great fluxes of nature, and indeed of natural catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanoes (and technological imagination may be relied on to find ways and means to harness them). What is alarming, by contrast, is the dynamics of disequilibrium, the uncontrollability of the energy system itself, which is capable of getting out of hand in deadly fashion in very short order. We have already had a few spectacular demonstrations of the consequences of the liberation of nuclear energy (Hiroshima, Chernobyl), but it must be remembered that any chain reaction at all, viral or radioactive, has catastrophic potential. Our degree of protection from pandemics is epitomized by the utterly useless glacis that often surrounds nuclear power stations. It is not impossible that the whole system of world-transformation through energy has already entered a virulent and epidemic stage corresponding to the most essential character of energy itself: a fall, a differential, an imbalance - a catastrophe in miniature which to begin with has positive effects but which, once overtaken by its own impetus, assumes the dimensions of a global catastrophe.

Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.

A good deal of theorizing about the importance of private property rights concerns what is called the tragedy of the commons. Grazing fields in traditional English villages were collectively owned by the village’s inhabitants; since no one could be excluded from access to these fields, whose resources were depletable, they were overused and made worthless. The solution to the risk of depletion was to turn the commons into private property, whose owners would then have a strong incentive to invest in its upkeep and exploit its resources on a long-term, sustainable basis. In an influential article, Garrett Hardin argued that the tragedy of the commons exists with respect to many global resources, such as clean air, fisheries, and the like, and that in the absence of private ownership or strong regulation they would be overexploited and made useless.3 In

Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress.

The Great German general Erwin Rommel once made a distinction between a gamble and a risk. Both cases involve an action with only a chance of success, a chance that is heightened by acting with boldness. The difference is that with a risk, if you lose, you can recover: your reputation will suffer no long-term damage, your resources will not be depleted, and you can return to your original position with acceptable losses. With a gamble, on the other hand, defeat can lead to a slew of problems that are likely to spiral out of control. With a gamble there tend to be too many variables to complicate the picture down the road if things go on. The problem goes further: if you encounter difficulties in a gamble, it becomes harder to pull out—you realize that the stakes are too high; you cannot afford to lose. So you try harder to rescue the situation, often making it worse and sinking deeper in to the hole that you cannot get out of. People are drawn into gambles by their emotions: they see only glittering prospects if they win and ignore the ominous consequences if the lose. Taking risks is essential; gambling is foolhardy. It can be years before you recover from a gamble, if you recover at all.

In a freely competitive market, one might have expected the lowest-cost oil supplies to be developed first to the highest degree possible while higher-cost resources would be abandoned until depletion of cheap oil made room for them at a higher price point. Under this kind of competitive structure, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the other Gulf producers, whose lowest-cost reserves represent two-thirds of proven world reserves, could have increased their levels of investment and produced a vastly higher amount of oil. Instead, OPEC generally tried to hold oil prices up to maximize revenues over two years. In effect, OPEC had to choose between higher prices or higher market share. They chose the former. The New York University energy economist Dermot Gately noted in a 2004 paper that it was not in OPEC’s collective interests to meet rising demand for oil. He calculated that it made no sense for the cartel to add oil supplies into the market because the marginal gain in revenue from more output would be negative.

Since the early seventeenth century we’ve been fervently digging up this buried ancient carbon that cook tens of millions of years for the Earth to slowly stockpile, and we burned a great deal of it in just a few centuries. While there are concerns over peak oil and the diminishing supply of crude, there is plenty of accessible coal still underground – certainly another few centuries’ worth at current consumption rates. In this sense, then, we’re not currently facing another energy crisis but a climate crisis, born as a result of our past solution to our energy hunger

Since the early seventeenth century we’ve been fervently digging up this buried ancient carbon that cook tens of millions of years for the Earth to slowly stockpile, and we burned a great deal of it in just a few centuries. While there are concerns over peak oil and the diminishing supply of crude, there is plenty of accessible coal still underground – certainly another few centuries’ worth at current consumption rates. In this sense, then, we’re not currently facing another energy crisis but a climate crisis, born as a result of our past solution to our energy hunger.

The carbon dioxide released by the combustion of fossil fuels has been rapidly increasing its level in the atmosphere, which is now 45 per cent higher that prior to the Industrial Revolution.

This idea is extremely clever and highlights that there is exclusivity even around the use of violence. The state can legitimately use force to impose its will and increasingly so can the rich. Take away that facility and societies will begin to equalize. If that hotel in India that I went to was stripped of its security, they’d have to address the complex issues that led to them requiring it. “These systems can be very expensive. America employs more private security guards than high school teachers. States and countries with high inequality tend to hire proportionally more guard labor. If you’ve ever spent time in a radically unequal city in South Africa, you’ll see that both the rich and the poor live surrounded by private security contractors, barbed wire, and electrified fencing. Some people have nice prison cages, and others have not-so-nice ones. But when there’s inequality, there’s got to be someone making sure, with force, that it stays that way.” Matt here, metaphorically, broaches the notion that the rich too are impeded by inequality, imprisoned in their own way. Much like with my earlier plea for you to bypass the charge of hypocrisy, I now find myself in the unenviable position of urging you, like some weird, bizarro Jesus, to take pity on the rich. It’s not an easy concept to grasp, and I’m not suggesting it’s a priority. Faced with a choice between empathizing with “the rich” and “the homeless,” by all means go with the homeless. It is reductive, though, not to acknowledge that all are encompassed by this system and none of us are free while it endures. I’m not saying it’s worse to be one of Bernie Ecclestone’s kids than Jason, the homeless bloke who lives under the bridge at the end of my street; I’m saying that the two are connected and everyone will benefit from change. I should also point out that empathy, sympathy, and love are limitless resources, energies that never deplete, and at this time of dwindling fuels we should cherish and explore these inexhaustible inner resources more than ever.

We’re committed to voluntary human extinction. We believe procreation is actually just child abuse— it’s entirely unethical to bring children into a world where they will inevitably suffer. Population growth causes environmental degradation, resource depletion, poverty and inequality.

... work in social psychology has made it clear that cognitive control is a limited resource. When a teacher taps on a dozing student's desk and says: "Pay attention!" it turns out that this is not a metaphor: attention is costly, and if it is "spent" on one task there is less available to spend on another. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". ... The moral? Effort is effort, mental or physical.

Researchers observed that seeking to avoid stereotypes is tiring work and can deplete cognitive resources and hinder performance.