The
basics of personal financial planning must necessarily be far
different from anything that most of us are used to, especially on a
timescale of a decade or more.
Many
of us in middle class America are lucky if we can keep a job for a
year, and very lucky if it lasts five years; this is likely to get
worse as corporations continue their drive to exponentially reduce
the cost of labor to keep their profits growing. Humanity's pillage
and sabotage of natural systems will continue to contribute to
increasing costs of food, water, healthcare, and insurance. Energy
prices will keep rising, boosting the prices of everything else. As
a result, less money will be available for investment, which is the
main driver for both economic growth and providing income when people
are unable to continue working. Eventually, even ultra-rich wealth
hoarders will find it extremely difficult to maintain a
comfortable standard of living.
It
is useful, when planning, to consider at least three possible
scenarios for the conditions that will influence that planning: an
expected case, worst case, and a best case. Given the dynamics
described above and a realistic extrapolation of current trends, by
2030 most people will be losing money and more people will die than
are being born. In the worst case, things will degrade far faster,
in large part due to global warming that already threatens to bring
about a world food shortage as early as next year. A good candidate
for the best case is a world-wide race to enable a healthy lifestyle
for everyone that provides resources for other species and includes
use of clean, efficient, and renewable technologies across the board,
beginning with energy, that also focus on the cleanup of existing
waste.
Common
to all three scenarios is personally withdrawing from activities and
products that are the opposite of the best case; that is, dirty,
inefficient, and unhealthy. What differentiates the scenarios is
whether this will be voluntary or not, and whether the damage we've
done will become self-sustaining, unrepairable, and overwhelmingly
fatal.
The
last time the world was consuming a safe amount of ecological
resources (the ecological footprint was low enough to accommodate
other species and ourselves) was in 1975. Consumption is now an
estimated 1.75 times as much, with the environment becoming
effectively unlivable when that ratio hits 2 (I project peak world
population when the ratio is 1.9). Here in the U.S., we consume more
than the world average (largely at the expense of other countries);
this means we would need to consume no more than 20% of what we do
now to help maintain a healthy planet.
Based
on data from the Global Footprint Network, the U.S. as a whole could
make the necessary reduction by eliminating its carbon and forest
footprints. Focusing on reducing both of these ecological impacts
would have the added benefit of addressing the problem of climate
instability. As simple as it appears, the reality will be extremely
difficult given how pervasive the use of wood, fossil fuels, and oil
derivatives is in our society, but on a personal level we can do as
much as possible so the alternative scenarios become less probable.
