What is Occupy Wallstreet?

[Jester]

Look at this globally. Our consumption the west is so over the top only because we have the ability to get stuff for very very cheap.
In poor countries labour laws and environmental protection are non existant. Once people get richer they will want to have a goof life and they will start worrying about having clean drinking water or air to breath.
This is of course all increased by the running out of resources.
What I see that is gettng more expensive:

(Practically everything)

This is the "we must pay for our sins" school of economics, and I'm afraid it doesn't make much logical sense. The United States is not poorer since Germany is rich. Why, then, would they be poorer if China was rich? If people in other countries are richer, it is because they can produce more. If they produce more, then the price of goods goes down, not up. There will be readjustments of relative prices (notably, the price of unskilled, non-mechanisable, products will go up: haircuts and clothing, for instance) but overall, prices of stuff relative to labour will go down - we will be wealthier. It will take fewer hours of our time to buy a given standard of living.

Commodities, I'm fairly bullish about. Energy prices will go up, but that will lead to efficiency gains. People will waste less, because it's expensive, and we will find ways to prioritize. Fossil fuels will be redirected to the places where their marginal impact is high, and everything else will run on electricity, produced through renewable or long-lasting sources. If metals get expensive enough, we'll just go to space to get them - asteroids aplenty. Remember the Simon-Ehrlich bet - prices do not climb forever, because prices express relative, not absolute, scarcity.

Environmental issues are important, but something else entirely - our ability to produce cheap stuff is not going to deteriorate, even as we push our planet further and further. But, until the day we tip ourselves over the edge, our productivity and wealth will continue to increase. Indeed, that's why environmental issues scare me more than resource shortages - there is no automatic economic mechanism for solving those problems.

-Jester