The moaners moan about over-consumption. They bemoan carbon footprints, the polluting of the planet, the exhaustion of natural resources, the potential horrors of global warming et al. I often agree with them especially as there is a mindlessness of sorts that goes along with pure consumption.

Yet consumption is necessary. It is a basic requirement of survival. It is also life-blood to an economy which, like a living and breathing thing, has to be constantly fed. Spending and consuming are wealth generators as Adam Smith would doubtless have agreed. Maybe there needs to be ten billion people consuming the shit out of everything for it all to hang together. Maybe that is the answer to poverty. Maybe that would help bring about commune as everyone pulls together in the shared pool of an economy of consumption. By this account it would be the restless satisfying of appetites that provides a solution to economic problems and not the suppressing of those.

The Universe is a hostile place. Together with its elements, it mercilessly creates and destroys with no consideration. Our little enclave that sustains life is surely a transient event and will come apart one way or another sooner or later whatever humans do. When all the resources are used up they are used up and that would be that. At least humanity would go out in a blaze sticking two fingers up to Nature.

Such a strategy of heedless consumption is reckless certainly but it conforms better to human behaviour than does restrictive practices which tend to build frustration. And what if this: what if a solution were to come from new forms of invention able to provide sustainable energy sources. If that were possible then a world of ten billion consuming away as it pleases would be fine. A solution of some kind is necessary as soon enough there will be just such a world a world of ten billion all making demands on resources.

Perhaps there lies the answer to the kind of deficiency which has forever blighted the human experience. Perhaps within the issues of over-consumption and global warming is to be found the answer to the great historical trials of material sustenance. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.