ECOS NOMOS: QUALITY ENVIRONMENT

Benefits of 24 in 4: Time to stop and question the roses.

The unquestioned life is not worth living. Socrates

When history judges the human injustices of the 20th Century, it will not select Hitler who killed millions in a few years, nor Stalin, nor Mao nor Pol Pot. The lasting injustice of the 20th Century that will cause endless suffering and death will be America's gross, selfish violation of the human global body.

How can the environmentally concerned expect others to have time to think about the environment when two trends consume people's time and worry:

1. Workweek length is at a record post World War II high--the overworked have no time nor stamina for family let alone the environment,

2. Poverty is at record highs--the impoverished have no spare worrying capacity to question the purpose of life or environment.

When people have more time to stop and think, they will give more consideration to the environmental impact of their actions.

24 in 4 is a necessary step to creating environmentally aware voters. Overworked and overstressed people don't have time nor patience to be environmentally proactive. Nor can the people who are unemployed or underemployed.

Governments industrializing economies for fuller employment are environmental disasters. China's leap forward has created an environmental nightmare with a pollution debt greater in cost than the money created. People received a few temporary goods in exchange for a permanently damaged world. In light of rising sealevels and hotter/colder extremes, should we continue to let environment policy be set by penthouse dwellers who fly south in the winner and vacate north in the summer?

Humanity's workweek is self-limiting by the pollution generated from people working and consuming. The United States has 6% or 1/16 of the world's population but consumes 35% of world's energy. The U.S. generates 35% of CO2, global warming and pollution. What would happen if the other 94% (15/16) of the world's population achieved the U.S. 40-hour workweek? Energy consumption and pollution production would increase by a factor of 15!

Image 15 times more pollution and carbon dioxide! Imagine the cost of trying to solve these environmental problems! Long before the rest of the world achieves the U.S. level of consumption, the pollution would kill us. To repeat, workweek length is self-limiting based on numbers of people.

This self-limiting factor of pollution from population and consumption can be described in another way, a timistic analysis. The average person causes and solves problems, that is, wastes or saves time. Isolated on an island, the person has a certain level of problems which his existence causes. Integrated into a family unit, the person causes more problems by virtue of living. The problems per person rise significantly as the population density increases. Yet, the average problem-solving ability of the individual does not increase in a parallel fashion. Because our time-destroying existence is greater than our time-saving abilities, we are in an existential meltdown.

World-wide, work is self-limiting based on the number of people alive. We can share the work through the time clock or through a destroyed environment.

We can work some of the people all of the time, as we do now.
Or, we can work all the people some of the time, as we should do.
But we can't work all the people all of the time, as we are trying to.

Warning: Anyone found stealing lifehours will be forever banned from participation in and rewards of Better Democracy and Capitalism.
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