Saving Our Planet for Profit
There is enormous profit to be made saving our planet. Certainly new businesses, as yet unheard of, will generate
fortunes comparable to those created by Microsoft, but many businesses already extant will find profitability in new
directions. More on that later.
What do we mean by saving the planet? This is more than controlling global warming and making sure we have an
ample supply of lions, tigers and bears.
If we are to truly save the planet, it has to be permanent, and it has to include humans. By including humans, I
mean we need a sane, prosperous civilization, without slavery and without war.
I don’t know about you, but I am an American. I am spoiled. I want to keep my private car. I like to fly, too. I fully
intend to go where I want, when I want, and eat what I like regardless of the season where I happen to live. I also expect
the indoor temperature to be to my liking, and I’m going to take as many showers – every day – as I choose.
At the same time, I want heavy metal free fish, and antibiotic free beef, my vegetables not grown with the aid of
poisons. I want the air I breathe to be good for my lungs and not burn my eyes. The list could go on, but need I say
more?
Finally, I want all the above for everyone. As a businessman, the profit potential from providing the above makes
me drool! Again, more on that later.
The Long and the Short of It
Profit makes the world go around. Take a farmer, for instance. If he plants his seed and gains only enough from
his crop to feed himself and his family, what will he do? Either his family goes hungry in order to save enough seed for
next year’s crop, or they all eat well now and starve to death next year.
He needs more than enough to get by each year, of course. The farmer has to grow enough to feed his family plus
enough to set aside seed for next year. He needs a good surplus in addition, so that he can trade with his neighbors for
things he cannot grow or make himself.
Even that is not enough. What about setting aside for one of those disastrous years when he loses his crop to
flood or pests? What will his family eat then? What will he plant for the next year? So he needs more than enough to
eat, more than enough to plant, more than enough to trade – and he still has no profit!
Profit is what is left over after handling all contingencies. It’s the reward for working hard and smart. If there is no
profit, no reward, what kind of a life does the farmer have? Can he even keep it up? Face it, all work and no play
makes Jack stop working.
By profit, I mean a good profit. Enough of a surplus to treat yourself and your family quite well. Enough of a
surplus to expand to another field with another crop, and keep it going, without diminishing the viability of crop number
one or making your family less comfortable, until it is profitable in its own right. Enough to hire more people, to do more
work, leaving you more time to plan for the future without sacrificing anything. Enough to pay trustworthy help to keep
the farm doing very well indeed while you and the family go over the river and through the woods to spend a couple of
weeks at Grandfather’s house.
That’s profit. That is what makes the world go around for the human race. It’s a basic, simple concept. Through
the profit motive, we will save the planet for ourselves and our great-great-great grandchildren.
Why, you may ask, if it is so simple, so obvious, are our air and water continually getting worse? Why do we have
senseless wars, some of which no one even bothers to justify, all around the globe? Why do most of us bring in less
money, to buy fewer things, of lesser quality, at a higher price?
Sad to say, this too is a result of the profit motive.
I’m not going to get into a long rant about short-sighted, greedy bastards, who are willing to destroy the planet for
their own children for a quick buck; who demand more labor for lower pay from their employees, to the point where those
same employees can no longer afford to purchase the very products they make. We all know they exist, but that is the
subject for another article or two, maybe a book or two.
This time, let’s assume they do not fully understand the concept of profit. We will define it further. This article is for
them, too.
In our race for ever greater income and higher levels of profit, it is easy to forget where our income comes from,
and why it continues to grow. We somehow don’t remember that we are standing on the backs of others – others who
must remain strong – in order to see above the trees to yet greater heights.
In an ideal marketplace – and we should always strive for the ideal – you have a prosperous customer base. I am
not talking about the people at the top of the heap. This prosperous customer base is made up of “average Joes.”
People like your own employees.
Remember the example of what it takes for the farmer to have a profit? Well, this applies to everyone. If someone
is going to buy your product, he will be doing it from his surplus, his profit.
A good barometer (better than current profitability) of the potential future of your business is the prosperity of your
workforce.
I don’t mean you are making everyone rich. There are plenty of examples of this not working. I mean, can they
afford to buy the products they produce? Can they buy the little extras that make them feel good? Can they: buy a
house, educate their kids, take a vacation, buy a new car every few years, eat at a nice restaurant on the weekends?
In this ideal marketplace, your employees as well as the employees of others can do all the above. This leaves
open the possibility of expansion across the board. It means innovation (possibly yours) can be funded. You can come
up with a new product of high quality and have a fair chance it will be profitable. This is simply not true in a world where
the average Joe has no profit.
Perhaps you can remember, as I can, when America really was the most prosperous, innovative nation on Earth.
That’s as opposed to the present when Americans are told how well they are doing by their “leaders” while they watch
their standard of living diminish, their health deteriorate, their children end their education with high school.
In those days, most of us drove American cars made in America, textiles from the same. When we called our bank
to check on something, we spoke with someone in the same country (usually the same town) who wasn’t reading from a
script.
At the same time, while not universal, union membership was common. Those employers whose employees were
not unionized had to pay a living wage if they wanted to retain good help. While the numbers were smaller (think
inflation), all but the poorest of poor families had a single bread winner.
By contrast, today’s average family needs two bread winners just to get by, many (if not most) of the products we
buy come from overseas (with dangerously unpredictable quality), and do not get me started on “customer service!”
If you think having a “stay at home mom” is without value, compare the overall health and educational level of the
generation born between 1945 and 1960 with that of their children, most of whom have no idea their life expectations
are drastically diminished from those of their parents.
Assuming, for the most part, that mankind is not simply evil and believes his only chance of survival is the death of
all others, then today’s economy can only be the result of short-sighted greed, aided by unbelievably incompetent
management and abetted by astonishing stupidity. It’s an amazing example of a lack of sane long term planning, and an
utter inability or lack of willingness to observe and compute with what is right in your face on a daily basis.
You just do not gut your manufacturing base, coerce your most competent employees to work for beginning wages
(with longer hours), cut costs by firing most of the team that built your business, spend less on raw materials while
producing a higher quantity of lower quality goods, then send the best paying jobs to countries with a lower standard of
pay, and not expect the economy to come back and bite you on the ass!
If you do the above – and we have – your employees cannot afford to buy what they produce. Then, of course,
they cannot afford to buy from your fellow business owners either. In order for your fellow business owners to get their
prices down to a level your employees can afford, they have to cut costs, and recent history has shown them doing this
by “downsizing” and cutting quality. Then, of course, their employees (those that remain) cannot afford to buy your
goods…. It is a vicious, vicious circle.
If you then reward the idiotic management that helped you create this travesty with ever higher pay (from the
“savings” of your laid off producers) and multi-million dollar bonuses for their failure, you have the economy of the
United States of America in 2008.
I assure you that this could have been avoided – and can still be turned around – with proper planning and
organization. I’m planning a series of articles on how that can be accomplished, but right now I want to get to some of
the potentially lucrative areas I was drooling about at the beginning of this one. (If it seems to you that I’m not publishing
the articles I mentioned fast enough, give me a nudge at RobertHawkins@TrueNica.com.)
The Big Bucks
Let’s keep this as short as we can for now, concentrating on a couple of categories. Either category can be
expanded by anyone with an idea.
I personally hate the idea, especially popular in the USA, that in order for us to have comfortable, healthy lives, we
have to pollute our air, ground water, soil and oceans at an ever increasing rate. I probably hate the idea because it is
insane. It’s like curing a headache with a bullet. True, the ache is gone, but so is the head. This is the kind of thinking
we are expected to swallow on a daily basis. Let’s turn it around a little here.
The source of pollution we hear about the most is the air pollution caused by our cars. Cars burn oil byproducts,
inefficiently, and do horrible things to our air, most noticeably in our cities, but it affects the atmosphere of the entire
planet.
Efforts to come up with engines that burn non-polluting fuels, or that do not depend on combustion at all, are fought
and stamped out whenever possible by oil companies, aided by their lapdogs in government. This is an example of
short-sighted greed, of course, but I won’t go on about it.
The person who comes up with an engine that efficiently burns hydrogen, for example, and manages to get it used
in cars on a regular basis can change his name to Edison. The one who makes the infrastructure to handle it easily
obtainable and controls it well enough to make it common across a continent is the next Bill Gates.
Let’s take a closer look at the fortunes to be generated by this revolution.
We don’t just burn oil and other, equally filthy, carbonaceous matter, to drive our cars. The same crap powers
trucks, freight trains, ships at sea and in the air! It also powers our electrical generation and whatever non-electric
engines are used in our factories.
The biggest arguments against the progress we are seeking, are that it takes more energy than you create to get
your hydrogen and that the infrastructure for such a radical change does not exist, and that new infrastructure is an
enormously expensive program.
Both arguments are true for now, but let me tell you a little story.
When the automobile was first introduced, there were as many people against it as were for it. It was noisy and
stinky, but you could travel faster and longer than a running horse as long as you had a reasonably obstacle free
surface to travel on.
Oil was plentiful, but most of it was still in the ground. There weren’t enough decent roads or bridges, and gasoline
stations were few and far between.
If you store oil in a tank for a while, some of the evaporation condenses as a primitive but workable form of
gasoline. In 1951, my father, who worked in an oil field, burned this stuff in his ancient Model A work car.
Gasoline could be made this way, but it took too long to be practical for any kind of mass market. Large refineries
would be needed.
My whole point here is that the infrastructure for our current free-wheeling, oil dependent society didn’t exist! A few
visionaries with money financed the start of the very infrastructure we have today. The refineries to produce billions of
gallons of gasoline, the roads, the bridges, and the cars that use them were created by a few smart people.
There is nothing to stop a few smart people from putting in new infrastructure today. Everyone involved will make a
ton of money – the engineer/inventors, the courageous early manufacturers, the fuel producers and distributors, and oh
my god, the visionary venture capitalists who will be the first trillionaires on Earth!
Okay. The next great polluter is agriculture. The overwhelming majority of American grains and vegetables are
grown on depleted soil with the aid of chemical fertilizer (the stuff you make bombs with) and pesticides.
All this stuff, deadly to humans and their pets, pollutes our groundwater and runs off to the sea, where it has a
similar effect on marine vegetation and fish. We, of course, eat those tainted fish.
Meat and dairy. The animals are crowded together so closely that they are injected and fed antibiotics and growth
hormones to keep them “healthy and productive.” We eat and drink what they are treated with, and I know you have
seen the generally unhealthy populace all around you.
Besides the stuff we eat and drink from these animals, there are the pesticides they are sprayed with and their
mountains of manure and oceans of urine. Where do you think it goes, along with its content of hormones, antibiotics
and pesticides? Right into our rivers and streams, and hence to the oceans and our drinking water.
I’m not even going to get into potentially deadly genetically modified organisms.
I will say this, though. I was born in 1946. When I was growing up, few people were overweight, and seeing a truly
obese person was almost like going to the circus. On the surface, we were eating the same foods then as now.
All this is another symptom of short-sighted greed, lack of sensible planning.
The means to handle both the pollution from our agriculture and the unhealthy human bodies it helps create exists
right now. All that is needed are a few venture capitalists, some knowledgeable agriculturists who want to help nurse us
back to health, and good distribution.
The people with the means and the will to turn our food production and distribution around will make Sam Walton’s
(Walmart) family look like paupers.
I could probably cover fifty pages with ways to make a fortune saving our planet and the human race with it.
There are plenty of problems to solve, and the solvers of problems make fortunes. There are no disasters that
cannot be turned around somehow, and for a profit.
Every dark cloud does in fact have a silver lining. If you see one, catch it. Silver is a natural antibiotic, you know,
and closed today in New York at a little over $18.90 an ounce.
Copyright © 2008, by Robert Hawkins.