Demonstrating need for effective use of resources

Establishing case for efficient resource use
Increasing efficient use of resources

Description

The principle of efficient use of resources states that humans must value resources at their true worth and learn to use them frugally. This includes not exploiting renewable resources more rapidly than they can replenish themselves, counting the true costs of depleting nonrenewable resources, and requiring that those who cause pollution pay to clean it up. Under the principle of efficient use, emphasis is given to reducing consumption, recycling and reuse of products, and recovering of resources.

Implementation

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

Claim

The best thing you can do for any resource is to increase demand; the more oil we use, the more we find and the more ways to extract it cheaply from difficult reserves. The only thing that interferes with this process, and drives a resource to extinction, is the failure to enforce property rights so that nobody can benefit from seeking oil reserves, planting trees or conserving elephants. No resource has grown either more expensive or more scarce since the beginning of history. Everything has become more available and cheaper -- despite the growing population of the world: flint, timber, water, iron, copper, wheat, oil, meat, plutonium, rubber, natural gas, gold. Yet shortages and price increases of each of these things have been relentlessly predicted by experts throughout that history.