Therefore, in a monetary system, corporations are not just in competition with other corporations;
they are actually in competition with progress itself. [Applause] Thank you. And again, this
is why it's so difficult to have any form of change in a monetary system. You simply
cannot have a social convention where money is made off of inefficiency and scarcity and
misery and expect a quick incorporation of new advents that can relieve these problems.
Okay, with that understood, let's get back to the energy problem. The final issue I'd
like to point out is this: Apart from the fact that there's a great deal of money to
be made by the select few, as the majority suffers; apart from the fact that the established
energy institutions have little motivation to forgo their profitability to alter society's
energy mediums is the very harsh reality that due to the outstanding debts, globally right
now - I think as we all know, the Earth is essentially bankrupt, as hilarious as that
is - there's likely not gonna be enough money to change anything. I want everyone to think
about this very critically. As exciting as the potentials are for renewable energy in
the fields of solar, geothermal, tidal, wave, and the like, potentials that have been documented
thoroughly, that will far exceed the global energy consumption by thousands and thousands
of percent, we still have this serious problem in our current structure of financing the
infrastructure to make this transition. How do we transition into a new infrastructure,
where every single government on this planet, every country, owes money to someone else?
Where, they're seeing a systemic breakdown of bankruptcy starting to occur in Europe-
and in the United States it's just a matter of time. Given the current state of affairs,
and the urgency of renovation, especially with peak oil, how could we possibly afford
to make a transition to these renewable energies, before the scarcity of oil begins to shut
down, due to excessive oil prices, because of supply and demand? One study by a leading
expert in Sweden predicts by 2030 the world will be using 10 barrels of oil for every
new barrel discovered or extracted. That's really not that far away. So, how can we expect
the United States, with over $12 trillion worth of debt, barely able to cover its interest
payments to other governments with state bankruptcies occurring, near depression level unemployment,
cutting social programs- we're already selling off infrastructure to foreign countries- how
can we expect to afford to move into a new infrastructure? I'm using energy as just a
singular example; there's many other problems we have to deal with. In 2008 the executive
director of the International Energy Agency stated that it would take $22 trillion in
investment to update the global energy supply and infrastructure by 2030. 22 trillion dollars!
Where's that money gonna come from? Do you really think that we're going to get away
with just randomly printing more and more money in the central banks, and expect no
inflationary repercussions, or debt collapse repercussions? Remember, all money comes into
existence from loans. There has to be an initiator. Every single dollar in all of your wallets
is owed to somebody by somebody. And this again leads us into the heart of the disease:
The economic monetary-based system, or "The Game", as I like to call it- because that's
all it is; that's all it ever was, a game- and we can change the game anytime we want.
We just need to convince those who are winning the game to put down their pieces for a moment
and ask themselves if the game they are playing is really gonna reward them in the long run.
In a report coming out of the AFP, there's growing evidence that the current rate of
our resource exploitation indeed has a time frame. The report states: "As it is, humanity
each year uses resources equivalent to nearly one-and-a-half Earths to meet its needs" said
the Global Footprint Network, an international think tank. "We are demanding nature's services
- using resources and creating CO2 emissions - at a rate 44% faster than what nature can
regenerate and reabsorb. This means that it takes the Earth just under 18 months to produce
the ecological services humanity needs in 1 year. And if humankind continues to use
natural resources and produce waste at its current rates, we will require the resources
of 2 planets to meet our needs by the early 2030s. A gluttonous level of ecological spending,
in their terminology, that may cause major ecosystem collapse" - the report said. Now,
by the way, I wanna point out that people hear that and they have a Malthusian notion,
they think that our consumption patterns are somehow inherent, and they are not going to
change. I read a statistic recently, and for my new film I'm going to do a huge section
on waste attributes of certain industries. And what I've come to find is that of all
the production that is done, on average 75% is waste. 75% is waste. Of all the materials
that are created and put into circulation and taken out, 90% of those end up in landfills,
I believe within 6 months. This isn't about some natural human thing that we are doing.
This is about the social system's obsession with constantly consuming for the sake of
economic growth. In an analysis done by the IRRC, by 2025 it's predicted that 2/3rds of
the world will experience water scarcity. Two thirds of the world, by 2025. Many seemingly
wealthy countries are already turning to desalinization processes. In turn, over 1 billion people
are starving on this planet. Do you, with everything that we have discussed, think that
any of these things are going to get better, given our current financial crisis? And again,
in case you haven't figured it out, the problems of water scarcity and food scarcity is indeed
100% economic. There are many types of desalinization processes which could take salt water and
convert it into clean water, in all of these poor countries. But guess what? No one has
any money to implement these types of solutions in poor countries. The same goes for food.
We've gotten to a point with scientific invention that we don't even need arable land anymore
which, by the way, is eroding at a rate of about 1 inch a year, due to the abusive agricultural
methods that are being utilized. And please note, it takes about 500 years for fresh topsoil
to emerge. Hydroponics and Aeroponics, alone, if applied correctly, could provide for all
the world's people, without the wasted water resources, in part, and the excessive need
for nitrogen-based fertilizers. In fact, you could build these facilites on the land that
is depleted; in stories. You could have sky-scrapers, if you will, of organic food production on
an industrial level. But once again, who has the money to do that? And on an extremely
enraging and sad note, the more we experience social breakdown, the more human exploitation,
crime and abuse will occur. While here in America we think that slavery was abolished
many decades ago, the fact is there are now more slaves in the world than any time in
human history, given the definition of slavery. However, this time it doesn't come from the
form of owning people, it is simply the globalization attribute of exploitation for cheap labor.
I'm going to stop here, as far as talking about the negative attributes inherent in
our system along with the ongoing social collapse, which by the way I personally can't see an
end to for a very long time, if at all, frankly, until we move into something more sustainable.
The personal and private debts, for example, are so high right now that it's gonna take
another number of bubbles to burst before any type of so called stability is going to
occur. Anyway, before I go on to the final section of this talk, which is essentially
an introduction to The Venus Project and a resource-based economy, let me summarize by
saying that the monetary paradigm economic structure, as we know it, is again, the basic,
systemic source of the majority of the world's problems we have around us. In this system,
if this cancer is allowed to grow unabated, spreading its malignant propensities across
the globe, utterly decoupling from the natural world and the carrying capacity of the Earth,
destroying the finite resources we all share, we are on pace with nothing less than something
that no one can even consider, of a collapse. And I'm not talking about waking up one day
and there's nothing anywhere. It's not like that. It's where slowly it erodes to a point
where the values and the culture and the awareness becomes so distraught and so confused that
the levels of quality of life become justified. When you start to accept less and less. It's
gonna slow everything down to a crawl. And invariably there will be some dramatic accents,
if you will, of severe problems, especially, when it comes to the energy crisis that is
looming. Something radical has to be done. We are approaching a terminal stage. Part
3: Treatment. There are two angles to consider when attempting to resolve these problems.
The first is the mentality of the culture, as we discussed before, the cultural programs.
And the second is the actual structure of social operation. As noted earlier in our
discussion, these two attributes are deeply interlinked. However, regarding the first
issue of cultural conditioning, we need to employ what I call, as a movement we need
to employ what I call "Social Therapy". Social Therapy refers to adjusting a society's values,
changing the value programs. We must have sustainable values in order to have sustainable
practices. I would suggest that the first program that needs to be uninstalled, from
our mental hardware, is the social distortion that generates conspicious consumption, pushed
forward by the corporately-aligned advertising agencies. The value orientation of having
more and more stuff, regardless of their utility or function, is an unsustainable ideology,
inherently, on a finite planet. Consumerism and materialism again are sicknesses, culturally
created to perpetuate the cyclical consumption needed to fuel the market and labor system.
This is precisely what The Zeitgeist Movement is trying to do. We can't do anything until
people understand the need for this direction, which is why we are here, right now; which
is why this is being webcast; which is why those involved in the movement are diligently
working, not to create infrastructure yet, but to try to get these values out there.