TOUGH BANANAS

A NEW LEARNING
The wealthiest people have certainly taken a hit in the downturned economy. Mind you I am not crying sympathetic tears. They are not relegated to food stamps. A few weeks ago in commenting about the world’s hungry, I referenced the world’s capacity for feeding all the world’s people and I casually mentioned the world’s three wealthiest men in order of their worth from Warren Buffet with 62B, Carlos Slim Helu with 60B and William Gates III with 58B. Times change. A recent report informs us that the recession has knocked these boys around and Buffet got buffeted into second place losing 25B taking him to 37B. Helu and family also lost 25B rendering him next to penniless with 35B, and Gates claims top spot once again with a minimal loss of 18B for a worth of 40B.

Canadian billionaires are bumpkins in this extraordinary network of wealth. David Thompson and family of Canada rank twenty-fifth in the list of the world’s billionaires with 13B. Canadian Galen Weston and family have 5B, and brothers James, Arthur and John Irving share 3.9B. Vancouver’s Jim Pattison is a pauper at 2.1B. While Canada has 18 billionaires, the Unites States has 335. Customarily it takes people a number of years to acquire billionaire status so the average age among the world’s 793 billionaires is 63. Not Oprah. She is still riding a crest at 2.5B. What surprised me was the relative poverty of Donald Trump with 1.5B. Three hundred and seventy-three people lost their billionaire status during this past year. They will have to survive with multi millions of dollars.

No, don’t cry for them. The average Canadian family lost 14 thousand dollars this year and that hurts you much worse than the 15 or 20 billion of the big boys. Most have left their investment or RRSP portfolios intact waiting for recovery. That's advisable if you are young. Other people have pulled their monies out, unwilling to risk more. A financial advisor told me,"Well you only lost the gains that you have made over the last six years." That was a tactless comment and callous comfort.

A Different Future

A NEW LEARNING
Across the street, my neighbours’ son Matthew turned 18 recently and I noticed that he now has a small car to drive to high school. Perhaps my grandchildren ages 2 through 8 presently will also be able to come of age and own or at least drive a car. The possibility is becoming increasingly less likely. I make that bleak observation based on data I have harvested from the World Health Organization and a Population Media site as well as an informative site on energy and fuels called Transition Boulder County.

In the 21st century our world is facing unprecedented challenges because of peak oil and dramatic climate change which drives food scarcity. 18 million people die of starvation or starvation related diseases annually worldwide. The “Age of Oil” supported huge population growth previously but that capability is declining and the human population is exploding. The globe is receiving 77 million additional net gain humans annually. The projection is that human planet expansion will multiply from the present 6.7 billion to anywhere from 9.2 billion to 9.8 billion people in 41 years, that is, by the year 2050. If humanity cannot feed 18 million people that will die in mass in 2009, how will humanity feed an added three billion in 41 years when oil supplies exhaust themselves? (Source: www.populationmedia.org)
Hyper-population growth is a subject that few or no leaders are wanting to address. This is a patent instance of short-sightedness from leaders who should be visionaries! (Source: World Health Organization)

If we think that alternative energy will solve the energy crisis, we may be disappointed. According to Michael Brownlee, Boulder, Colorado, www.transitionbouldercounty.org , “Alternative energy cannot and will not be able to replace the energy density of oil. Humans burn 85 million barrels of oil daily. That equals a cubic mile of oil annually. In order to equal that vast amount of energy it would take 91.2 million solar panels built every year for 50 years. Or, 102 coal-fired electrical plants built every year for 50 years. Or, 32,500 wind turbines built every year for fifty years. Finally, the alternative of 52 nuclear powered plants built every year for 50 years would equal one year of oil energy.”

Since there is nothing today or in the future that can equal the power of oil, the human race is facing a extremely dissimilar future. We will have to return to basic, simple living, within the energy restrictions of wind, light, water and animal power.

MONEY - THE GREAT DISTRACTION – THIS NASTY INTERRUPTION

A NEW LEARNING
This would be a good time to be a billionaire.
I’m serious. Of course I won’t make it into the top 100 Canadian billionaires club any time soon. These billionaires have each taken a financial hit this year, a few billion dollars – gone! But then there is a bit of a cushion upon which to fall back. And the wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffet is 80 years old. “What will I do?” is not an expression anyone hears him say.

In this reality show called My Retirement I am spending more time thinking about money than I have ever wanted to do. My issue is that this preoccupation is forced upon me, first by the reality of a pension income and second by the reality of the Great Disruption. This toughening economic time, this darkening cloud does not have an immediate silver lining on my show.

So believe me I am more annoyed than I am jealous that entertainers and sportsmen and big business people are pulling down enough money per year to capably support every household in my very large housing development. And still people like us curiously clamour to read how much she earned for starring in that movie, or how much he is earning for each basket he makes or how much she brings in for countless chips being installed in Blackberrrys.

This has been a depressing week for Christine and me.
We received our year end RRSP investment statement and learned that within a couple of months as stocks went slaloming south we had lost thousands of dollars from a meager portfolio we had worked our butts off to assemble. I keep looking for someone to blame but it’s futile. My commitment to a God who transcends all of this, and has more resources than we imagine keeps refocusing my gaze and ratcheting up my dependence upon Him.
Mark Zuckerberg is 23 and is the world's youngest billionaire. He designed Facebook a few years ago from his college dorm room. Good for him.