Quoting from an article in CNN entitled, OPEC cartel to reap record $1 trillion:
"The Opec oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia, will pocket a record of more
than US$1tn in net oil revenues in 2012 as the annual average price for
Brent, the benchmark, heads to an all-time high in spite of weak
economic growth.
"The windfall will provide fresh capital to some of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds.
United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the most influential
members of the cartel, are home to three of the world's 10 largest SWFs
by assets under management, according to estimates by the SWF
Institute."
The average price per barrel of oil in 2012
was $111.5, an all time record. Saudi Arabia's oil minister says they
planned to keep oil prices above a hundred dollars a barrel in 2012.
They've achieved their goal, much to the detriment of the rest of the
world's economy.
The price of oil is rising steeply,
driven by OPEC's desire to bleed the world. Only ten years ago, OPEC
made $200 billion. In 2012, they made over a trillion dollars. This
greatly helped the Save the King Foundation and the spread of Wahhabism worldwide,
but caused economic damage to the rest of the world. The last paragraph
of the article makes it clear that our gasoline prices are only going
to go up:
"The International Monetary Fund estimates
that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi both need oil prices at about $80 a barrel to
balance their budgets. Only a decade ago they were able to balance their
budgets with oil prices averaging $25." Gal Luft says they will need at least $110 a barrel by 2015.
If we had fuel competition in America, we wouldn't have to worry about this.
MIT Professor of Economics Emeritus Says What the Real Problem Is
M.A. Adelman, the MIT professor, wrote:
"The
real problem we face over oil dates from after 1970: a strong but
clumsy monopoly of mostly Middle Eastern exporters cooperating as
OPEC...Price fixing by private companies on the OPEC scale would not be
tolerated in any industrial country. In the United States, the officers
of firms that engage in such activities go to jail. But the OPEC members
are sovereign states, subject to no country's laws."
- Quoted from the book, Petropoly, by Anne Korin and Gal Luft.
This is, in fact, the real problem: We are victims of an illegal
fuel monopoly. But the Open Fuel Standard can solve this problem cleanly
and efficiently. And it won't cost taxpayers any money. It is not a
subsidy or handout. It's a simple change of policy. It is doing what
governments are supposed to use their power for: Preventing
monopolies from stopping free market forces from doing what they do
best.
Forests Are Disappearing
By 1968, ninety-five percent of the redwoods had been cut down.
People need wood for many things, of course. So they cut down trees. The larger the human population, the more trees are cut down. "In Kentucky," writes Greene, "the Daniel Boone National Forest is being converted by the U.S. Forestry Service into a regulated tree farm, and the Appalachians are under siege. More than half of the world's boreal forests have been reduced to junk mail and catalogs. The rain forests of South and Central America, Africa, and Indonesia, including the magical cloud forests; the enchanted Danube basin; the Black Forest; the monumental Russian Tiaga — all are falling, falling."
Massive trees are made of a massive amount of carbon. In the absence of the trees, the carbon is in the atmosphere, warming the planet.
Doesn't the Population Go Down When Countries Get Wealthier?
 |
| Princess Bolkiah, the fifth child of the Sultan of Brunei, one of the world's wealthiest men, on her wedding day. |
Nafis Sadik, the woman who ran the U.N.'s Population Fund for many years, said when she was first starting out in Pakistan as a medical doctor, many of her patients were women who were having a child every year, and often starting young. As a concerned doctor, Sadik counseled these women to slow down, to space out their births, to give her body a chance to recuperate. Having babies too close together drains a mother's body of nutrients and can cause debilitating anemia and other problems.
Dr. Sadik was shocked to hear the common response: "That's not my decision to make." In other words, she didn't have the power to decide whether to get pregnant or not. That was her husband's decision; not hers.
The population will not necessarily drop just because a country or a family becomes wealthier.
No, the key to slowing or reversing population growth is rights for women — the right to choose who she marries, when she marries, and how many children she wants to have. And the right to an education so she has economic choices and enough knowledge to use contraception. Population growth is consistently higher wherever women lack these basic human rights.
Solve Problems With Creativity
Yale psychologist Alan E. Kazdin did an experiment with kids suffering from "conduct disorder" — young people prone to violence, vandalism, truancy, and hostility.
Many things have been tried over the years but not much has been successful. How do you change a problem child into a healthy, happy, productive youngster? Theories abound. Results are rare.
Kazdin tried something unusual. He trained the trouble-making kids and their parents how to think up options for handling situations, and to come up with different ways of interpreting situations — other ways besides using hostility.
The result: Troublemaking was significantly reduced.
When the only response you have is hostility, that's what you do, regardless of whether it gets you the results you're after. Kazdin trained these people essentially to ask themselves, What else? The parents and their kids learned to say to themselves before they responded to something, "Okay, I could do that (what I've always done), but what else could I do?" He taught them to think of new options they hadn't thought of before.
And also he taught them to ask, "What else could it mean?" When someone bumped into them, for example, instead of immediately interpreting it as a hostile attack or a threat, they learned to ask themselves, "Okay, it might mean that, but what else could it mean?"
It seems a simple solution to a difficult problem. But it's harder than it seems. Our minds are designed to streamline our mental processes. Asking what else? makes the decision-process more complex. So it takes some deliberate effort to turn your mind to the task of coming up with alternative ideas.
This method is useful in many different ways. As I'm writing this, it's really cold outside, and even though a little while ago I had the heater turned up and my feet covered, my feet were still as cold as ice. Turning the heater up and covering my feet were obvious solutions. But, I asked myself, what else might work? What else could I do?
When you ask yourself a question, it awakens a part of your brain that answers questions. Ask a question, and your mind seems to search through all the things you've heard or know, and it often comes up with something.
I remembered my wife once telling me, "If your hands are cold, cover your head." She used to live in Lake Tahoe, and she learned a thing or two about dealing with cold weather. I grew up in Southern California and didn't know much about it.
So a little while ago I put a wool hat on. My feet aren't cold any more.
What else? It's such a valuable question. It's especially useful when you've been doing something a certain way for a long time. I'm always surprised when someone comes up with a new way to do something that's been done for a long time, because it makes me think, "Now why didn't I think of that?" Once you see the new way, it seems kind of obvious. But it took somebody asking what else? to come up with it.
"Unaware of Mind's effect in patterning and enslaving their lives," wrote William Bartley III, "people live in a state of waking sleep, in a state of enchantment, of mesmerism, most of the time. Every day, in every way, they become more and more the way they have always been."
A couple of days ago I saw measuring spoons, but rather than having a separate spoon for teaspoons and tablespoons and halves and fourths, it was a single spoon with one end of the cupped part capable of sliding back and fourth, making the cup bigger or smaller, and there were lines on it for teaspoon and half teaspoon, etc. Why didn't I think of that? Because I didn't ask, "What else could measure teaspoons besides the measuring spoon I'm so familiar with?"
DO SOMETHING ELSE
What else? is an especially practical question when what you usually do doesn't work very well. Besides getting miffed when a certain person makes certain kinds of remarks, what else could you do? You can do a certain task grudgingly, but how else could you do it? What other ways could you go about it? In what other ways could you think about it? When you interact with your teenager, and you both end up angry, ask yourself, "What else could I do?" What other approaches or responses can you think up besides what you normally do?
Here's a good rule: If what you're doing isn't working, do something else.
Of course, you don't want to go with something just because it's different, because in point of fact, the new idea might be worse.
Creativity is the process of thinking up new ideas and then rejecting most of them. But those are two processes, and the parts of your brains involved in each are different, so they can't really be done at the same time. In other words, when you're thinking up alternatives, don't judge the ideas for their merits at the same time. Let your mind go. Let it come up with crazy ideas, off the wall angles, impossible notions. This stretches your mind beyond the limits within which your thinking has been confined. Out of that loosened-up state of mind, a truly original idea and sometimes a perfect solution can suddenly become obvious. You just couldn't see it before because you were unknowingly confining your thinking about that subject within certain parameters.
Think up ideas, and keep thinking them up until you get a good one. And if it's important enough, and you have the time, keep thinking up ideas, keep asking what else? and see if you can come up with an even better one.
The best way to characterize "thinking" is as a dialogue. Consider thinking as a dialog with yourself. I know that if it is with yourself it's supposed to be called a monologue, but thinking isn't done very well as a monologue because there is nothing to provoke the thoughts further. A monologue is an expression of an already-decided thought. Dialogue can create something new.
Have a thought and then criticize it and you have a dialogue. Come up with an idea and then ask, "What else?" and you have dialogue, and that's where good thinking happens.
"Well, my in-laws are coming over," says Pete to himself, "and they always drive me nuts. Maybe I'll just not say anything."
If Pete stops there, his monologue has created one idea. But this time he has a dialogue with himself, and thereby becomes more creative. "Yes, I could try that," he says to himself, " but what else might work?"
"What else might work for what? I guess I need a goal if I want to think up an idea to solve it. I need to know what I'm trying to accomplish."
"I want to feel happy even when they are here."
"Do I feel happy when I say nothing?"
"No. I've tried that before. It's not much fun. It's a little better than being annoyed, but I'm definitely not happy."
"So what else could I do?"
"Since I want to be happy, I should do what makes me happy. I really enjoy playing my new video game. Maybe I can enlist one of them to play with me."
"Good idea. But I'm not going to stop there. What else could I do?"
"I like talking about politics. I could make that my theme for the night. I could turn every conversation to the subject of politics."
"That's a good one. What else could I do?"
And so on. The more Pete asks, the more he'll get. Some of his ideas will be goofy or won't work very well, but thinking is like good photography: You take several rolls and get rid of almost all of them. You'll have maybe two or three good ones, but they were worth all the waste.
All creativity is like that. You generate lots of ideas and throw out most of them. But in generating so many, you have more to choose from, so your chances of getting a better one improve as the number of ideas increases. And the way to get many ideas is to keep asking, "What else?"
Many things have been tried over the years but not much has been successful. How do you change a problem child into a healthy, happy, productive youngster? Theories abound. Results are rare.
Kazdin tried something unusual. He trained the trouble-making kids and their parents how to think up options for handling situations, and to come up with different ways of interpreting situations — other ways besides using hostility.
The result: Troublemaking was significantly reduced.
When the only response you have is hostility, that's what you do, regardless of whether it gets you the results you're after. Kazdin trained these people essentially to ask themselves, What else? The parents and their kids learned to say to themselves before they responded to something, "Okay, I could do that (what I've always done), but what else could I do?" He taught them to think of new options they hadn't thought of before.
And also he taught them to ask, "What else could it mean?" When someone bumped into them, for example, instead of immediately interpreting it as a hostile attack or a threat, they learned to ask themselves, "Okay, it might mean that, but what else could it mean?"
It seems a simple solution to a difficult problem. But it's harder than it seems. Our minds are designed to streamline our mental processes. Asking what else? makes the decision-process more complex. So it takes some deliberate effort to turn your mind to the task of coming up with alternative ideas.
This method is useful in many different ways. As I'm writing this, it's really cold outside, and even though a little while ago I had the heater turned up and my feet covered, my feet were still as cold as ice. Turning the heater up and covering my feet were obvious solutions. But, I asked myself, what else might work? What else could I do?
When you ask yourself a question, it awakens a part of your brain that answers questions. Ask a question, and your mind seems to search through all the things you've heard or know, and it often comes up with something.
I remembered my wife once telling me, "If your hands are cold, cover your head." She used to live in Lake Tahoe, and she learned a thing or two about dealing with cold weather. I grew up in Southern California and didn't know much about it.
So a little while ago I put a wool hat on. My feet aren't cold any more.
What else? It's such a valuable question. It's especially useful when you've been doing something a certain way for a long time. I'm always surprised when someone comes up with a new way to do something that's been done for a long time, because it makes me think, "Now why didn't I think of that?" Once you see the new way, it seems kind of obvious. But it took somebody asking what else? to come up with it.
"Unaware of Mind's effect in patterning and enslaving their lives," wrote William Bartley III, "people live in a state of waking sleep, in a state of enchantment, of mesmerism, most of the time. Every day, in every way, they become more and more the way they have always been."
A couple of days ago I saw measuring spoons, but rather than having a separate spoon for teaspoons and tablespoons and halves and fourths, it was a single spoon with one end of the cupped part capable of sliding back and fourth, making the cup bigger or smaller, and there were lines on it for teaspoon and half teaspoon, etc. Why didn't I think of that? Because I didn't ask, "What else could measure teaspoons besides the measuring spoon I'm so familiar with?"
DO SOMETHING ELSE
What else? is an especially practical question when what you usually do doesn't work very well. Besides getting miffed when a certain person makes certain kinds of remarks, what else could you do? You can do a certain task grudgingly, but how else could you do it? What other ways could you go about it? In what other ways could you think about it? When you interact with your teenager, and you both end up angry, ask yourself, "What else could I do?" What other approaches or responses can you think up besides what you normally do?
Here's a good rule: If what you're doing isn't working, do something else.
Of course, you don't want to go with something just because it's different, because in point of fact, the new idea might be worse.
Creativity is the process of thinking up new ideas and then rejecting most of them. But those are two processes, and the parts of your brains involved in each are different, so they can't really be done at the same time. In other words, when you're thinking up alternatives, don't judge the ideas for their merits at the same time. Let your mind go. Let it come up with crazy ideas, off the wall angles, impossible notions. This stretches your mind beyond the limits within which your thinking has been confined. Out of that loosened-up state of mind, a truly original idea and sometimes a perfect solution can suddenly become obvious. You just couldn't see it before because you were unknowingly confining your thinking about that subject within certain parameters.
Think up ideas, and keep thinking them up until you get a good one. And if it's important enough, and you have the time, keep thinking up ideas, keep asking what else? and see if you can come up with an even better one.
The best way to characterize "thinking" is as a dialogue. Consider thinking as a dialog with yourself. I know that if it is with yourself it's supposed to be called a monologue, but thinking isn't done very well as a monologue because there is nothing to provoke the thoughts further. A monologue is an expression of an already-decided thought. Dialogue can create something new.
Have a thought and then criticize it and you have a dialogue. Come up with an idea and then ask, "What else?" and you have dialogue, and that's where good thinking happens.
"Well, my in-laws are coming over," says Pete to himself, "and they always drive me nuts. Maybe I'll just not say anything."
If Pete stops there, his monologue has created one idea. But this time he has a dialogue with himself, and thereby becomes more creative. "Yes, I could try that," he says to himself, " but what else might work?"
"What else might work for what? I guess I need a goal if I want to think up an idea to solve it. I need to know what I'm trying to accomplish."
"I want to feel happy even when they are here."
"Do I feel happy when I say nothing?"
"No. I've tried that before. It's not much fun. It's a little better than being annoyed, but I'm definitely not happy."
"So what else could I do?"
"Since I want to be happy, I should do what makes me happy. I really enjoy playing my new video game. Maybe I can enlist one of them to play with me."
"Good idea. But I'm not going to stop there. What else could I do?"
"I like talking about politics. I could make that my theme for the night. I could turn every conversation to the subject of politics."
"That's a good one. What else could I do?"
And so on. The more Pete asks, the more he'll get. Some of his ideas will be goofy or won't work very well, but thinking is like good photography: You take several rolls and get rid of almost all of them. You'll have maybe two or three good ones, but they were worth all the waste.
All creativity is like that. You generate lots of ideas and throw out most of them. But in generating so many, you have more to choose from, so your chances of getting a better one improve as the number of ideas increases. And the way to get many ideas is to keep asking, "What else?"
This article was excerpted from the book,
Principles For Personal Growth by Adam Khan.
Principles For Personal Growth by Adam Khan.
Who is Allan Savory?
Allan Savory is a Zimbabwean ecologist, livestock farmer, environmentalist, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated Holistic management, a systems thinking approach to managing resources.
Savory advocates using bunched and moving livestock to what he claims mimics nature, as a means to heal the environment, stating "only livestock can reverse desertification. There is no other known tool available to humans with which to address desertification that is contributing not only to climate change but also to much of the poverty, emigration, violence, etc. in the seriously affected regions of the world." "Only livestock can save us."
Savory received the 2003 Banksia International Award and won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Prince Charles called him "a remarkable man" and noted farmer Joel Salatin wrote, "History will vindicate Allan Savory as one of the greatest ecologists of all time."
According to Savory, he has worked on the problem of land degradation (desertification) as early as 1955 in Northern Rhodesia, where he served in the Colonial Service as Provincial Game Officer, Northern and Luapula Provinces. He also claims to have continued this work in Southern Rhodesia first as a research officer in the Game Department, and even claims to have been an independent scientist and international consultant.
He advocated for slaughtering large numbers of elephants up until 1969 based on the idea that they were destroying their habitat. His research, which he claims was validated by a committee of scientists, led to the government culling 10,000s of elephants in following years. However, this did not reverse the degradation of the land. He has called the decision to advocate for the slaughter of large numbers of elephants "the saddest and greatest blunder of my life."
This unnecessary massacre, brought about by interpreting supposed research data to fit the prevailing world-view that too many animals causes overgrazing and overbrowsing, led to Savory becoming determined to solve the problem, which eventually led to his development of the holistic framework for decision-making and to holistic planned grazing, and to his book, Holistic Management: A New Decision Making Framework, written with his wife Jody Butterfield.
Savory was influenced by earlier work of French agronomist André Voisin who established that overgrazing resulted from the amount of time plants were exposed to animals, not from too many animals in any given area. Savory saw this as a solution to overgrazing, and believed that overgrazing was caused by leaving cattle too long and returning them too soon, rather than the size of the herd.
After leaving Zimbabwe, Savory worked from the Cayman Islands into the Americas, introducing holistic planned grazing as a process of management to reverse desertification of 'brittle' grasslands by carefully planning movements of dense herds of livestock to mimic those found in nature, allowing sufficient time for the plants to fully recover before re-grazing.
Savory immigrated to the US, and with his wife Jody Butterfield founded the Center for Holistic Management in 1984. Its name was later changed to the Savory Center and later Holistic Management International. In 2009 Savory left HMI and formed the Savory Institute. Savory, Butterfield and philanthropist Sam Brown formed the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, based in Zimbabwe in 1992 on 2,520 hectares (6,200 acres) of land Savory donated for the benefit of the people of Africa as a learning/training site for holistic management.
Thousands of farmers, ranchers, pastoralists and various organizations are working globally to restore grasslands through the teaching and practice of holistic management and holistic decision making. This includes conservation projects in the US, Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Canada, and Australia in which various NGOs, government agencies and universities are practicing holistic management and its holistic planned grazing to reverse desertification using livestock as the main agent of change to restore the environment, increase ground cover, soil organic matter and water retention, replenish streams, and combat biodiversity loss.
In 2003 Australia honored Savory with the Banksia International Award "for the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale" and in 2010, Savory and the Africa Centre for Holistic Management won The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an annual international design competition awarding $100,000 "to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems."
In a 2012 address to the International Union for Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress, Prince Charles said:
"I have been particularly fascinated, for example, by the work of a remarkable man called Allan Savory, in Zimbabwe and other semiarid areas, who has argued for years against the prevailing expert view that it is the simple numbers of cattle that drive overgrazing and cause fertile land to become desert. On the contrary, as he has since shown so graphically, the land needs the presence of feeding animals and their droppings for the cycle to be complete, so that soils and grassland areas stay productive. Such that, if you take grazers off the land and lock them away in vast feedlots, the land dies."
His 2013 TED Talk, "How to green the desert and reverse climate change," attracted millions of views and was followed up by the release of his TED Book, The Grazing Revolution: A Radical Plan to Save the Earth. In his TED Talk Savory asks, "What are we going to do?"
"There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind."
"The number one public enemy is the cow." says Savory. "But the number one tool that can save mankind is the cow. We need every cow we can get back out on the range. It is almost criminal to have them in feedlots which are inhumane, antisocial, and environmentally and economically unsound."
He condemns the practice of slash-and-burn cultivation of forests and grasslands, saying that it "leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it."
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