Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (March 1, 2026)
The subject of this month’s blog builds upon my blogs from the most recent months. In other words, how are we to address long-standing issues related to the grossly unequal distribution of wealth, how are we to protect the natural environment and how are we to do this fairly while at the same time shoring up our cherished freedoms and democracy?
The concept I shared last month with respect to the very real life and real time proposal to the governments of Papua New Guinea, Bougainville (an autonomous province still within Papua New Guinea), the Philippines, Australia as well as the United Nations has been forming since 2016 or for the last ten years. It is being presented by individuals with solid credentials in the fields of business and government who are long standing voters with center-right leanings (entirely different from the “far right wing” now unfortunately visible in the USA, in parts of Europe and in certain other parts of the globe).
78 percent of the currently quantifiable financial and economic wealth on earth is now in the form of commodities including (in this order) real estate, crude oil, gold, copper, natural gas (methane), silver, platinum and palladium. The surface area of the earth is currently 25 percent land and 75 percent water. Of the surface land 12 percent is currently used for agriculture (crops), 25 percent for agriculture (meadow and pasture land for ranching and grazing), 31 percent consists of forest cover and the remaining 32 percent of the surface land on earth is a combination of deserts, glaciers, barren land and the smallest amount built-up for human habitation.
Much of the meadow and pasture land is now used for domestic herds of farm animals used for human consumption and/or other usage. This population includes 60 million horses, 709 million rabbits, 850 million goats, one billion pigs, 1.7 billion cattle, 2.2 billion sheep and 23.7 billion chickens. An additional 216 billion fish and sea creatures are currently farmed (compares to the wild fish population of 3.5 TRILLION). Many people in today’s world are concerned with both 1) methane emissions and 2) animal cruelty.
The domestic animal populations listed here are already on the decline due to new technology which is already in the process of replacing slaughtered farm animals with laboratory grown meat. As we move forward, more and more of the meat consumed by human beings and other non-human animals with thus be laboratory grown meat instead of slaughtered farm animal meat. Note that this is NOT “fake” meat. It is real meat but grown in laboratories specifically for this purpose. The primary motive here is cost because laboratory grown meat is much less expensive to manufacture. Slaughtered meat will still be available but it will be very expensive – say in very upscale restaurants and in very upscale grocery stores.
The new technology driving this massive global change comes from the same source pushing the world into battery electric vehicles. In other words, it comes largely from northern California’s Silicon Valley. Here is a very informative video on the subject matter which is already transforming global agriculture and putting very many farms (including the largest corporate farms) out of business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEENR7Ofc5s&list=WL&index=3&t=5s.
