Category Archives: Big picture

8,000 an hour

Posted on by

Do you know how many books are sold before you have bestseller? Or how many patients go through emergency rooms? Or the significance of 8,000 an hour? No, then read on.

All authors would love for their latest book to become a best seller. But it’s not easy. Sales in the order of 3,000 per week are needed to get onto the New York Times best sellers list, so it helps if you are famous or get to chat with Oprah.

Here are some other numbers:

  • Hospital emergency departments vary in size but on average each ER treats 600 patients every week.
  • A medium–sized high school might have 1,500 students enrolled.
  • A suburban train with eight carriages can ferry 1,600 commuters at time from their homes to offices in the city.
  • A person who goes about their business but does not take much exercise will take 6,000 steps in a day, whilst active individuals might manage 10,000.
  • At rest a human adult will breathe steadily, roughly 12 times in a minute and 720 times in an hour.

And here is another one. Every hour of every day there are 8,000 more people on earth.

That is two and a half times the number of book buyers, the weekly throughput of 13 ERs, enough for five high schools, and the passengers from five commuter trains, every single hour of every day. If you prefer bigger numbers, 8,000 an hour grows to 192,000 per day, 1.3 million per week, and 70 million per year.

Every year there are more people added to the global population (births minus deaths) than there are Frenchmen. In two and a half days we add more people than there are elephants in Africa.

Amazing isn’t it. Staggering even.

Makes you think.

M

Spending on the environment

Posted on by

The Australian government budget outcome for 2008 reported an expenditure of A$280 billion (US$180 billion at time of writing) or 25% of GDP.

Divided equally, 280 billion would give each resident of Australia A$13,340 and that was, more or less, what happened to the money.

Welfare, health and education combined to account for A$161 billion or 58% of the expenditure. People accept taxes as a necessity of life partly because these things, along with infrastructure, defense and other primary needs are best paid for collectively.

It makes sense to also pay for fundamental services such as clean air, fresh water, food and shelter. The food we eat and the roof over our heads we pay for after the taxman has taken his cut. What about paying for the rest?

The government spend on the environment is difficult to estimate. There is no line item in the budget, so we must estimate for the following:

  • A3.8 billion on agriculture, fisheries and forestry
  • A$3.2 billion on recreation and culture
  • A$16.6 on the public service

Let’s be generous and say this adds up to A$10 billion or 3.6% of the federal environment spend. That’s A$10 billion for a land area of 7,692,024 square km.

This rounded amount, A$10 billion, is a curious figure. It suggests that we can get clean air, clean water, conservation, and aesthetic outcomes for 21 million inhabitants, plus extensive natural resource exports, for $13 per hectare.

“Ah,” the skeptic would interject, “what about the monies spent by the state and local government, not to mention the huge amount of input from farmers, resource managers and community groups?”

Fair enough. Let’s double the amount to capture the contribution from all pockets in the government purse – $26 per hectare is now more than the defense budget… by $4 per hectare.

It makes you think that from the government perspective at least, the environment is free.

Mark

Wisdom gurus

Posted on by

In my late 30’s I became a big fan of new age literature. Books by Tolle, Ruiz, Chopra, the Dalai Lama formed neat piles on my bedside table.

I still dip into this wealth of wisdom every now and then. It is true food for the soul.

It occurred to me that these spiritual masters and the many others who have written volumes to line the shelves in the personal growth sections of bookstores have very little to say about the environment.

They talk about the connectedness of all things, the ‘aliveness’ of the universe and the ripple effect of every action. They sometimes imply that there can be unwanted outcomes but they do not come straight out and say “this is what is wrong, humans are destroying the planet” or “to solve this environmental problem we must do this…”

More likely they will say “the pit of human despair is bottomless, don’t go there.”

I am curious to know what you think about this.

Why do the wisdom gurus stay away from the environment?

Mark

Kind of thinking

Posted on by

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” This famous quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, who seemed to be rather fond of the erudite sentence.

Always acknowledging the great man, I have often quoted this one myself, with a secret wish that it were my original. I use it so much because it always seems to be true.

So often we use the same thinking over and over again in the vain hope that the outcome will be different.

A recent proposal to solve our environmental woes is to account for nature. The idea is that if we can fully account for the resources we use by putting all the costs and values onto the dollar balance sheet, then this true costing would determine an adequate price paid to be paid for the array of environmental goods and services we consume. Even those sneaky externalities would get dragged onto the books.

I can see the logic. If resources are made available at full cost, then we might think twice before we buy them.

We could also begin to value and start to pay for the hidden services – clean air, fresh water, pollination, nutrient cycling etc – that we rely on but are currently free. And, by definition, we have a hard time valuing something that is free. Trouble is that this accounting logic is the child of an economic system that got us into the mess in the first place.

There is no evidence that accounting will slow demand. It is, after all, just a tool to understand the numbers, not a driver of resource use.  Indeed it may have the opposite effect of increasing demand for certain resources, especially in high demand locations, because if use is accounted, then it is legitimate. After all it is on the balance sheet.

I believe we need to think this one through very carefully.

Mark