Americans Deserve to Consume More Resources
In nature, the entity that supplies most of the benefit to a community gets most of the resources. Let's take the example of the Queen Bee. A queen develops from the same egg or larva as any other bee; the only difference is that she gets vastly greater amounts of royal jelly than the average worker honey bee. Because of this the queen develops into a sexually mature female.
It is the Queen Bee that ensures the survival of the hive and despite the communist misconception that it is the workers that contribute the most to society, nature itself makes the value judgment by allocating the greatest resources to whom she considers the most important. Of course, worker bees never complain that her Highness is only one bee yet consumes a greater proportion of resources than the rest of the hive. They know she deserves it.
Since I was a child I have heard, read, and seen reports about how much of the world's resources we few greedy Americans consume. Here's one:
Solar Energy International, Energy Consumption
- Though accounting for only 5 percent of the world's population, Americans consume 26 percent of the world's energy.
- In 1997, U.S. residents consumed an average of 12,133 kilowatt-hours of electricity each, almost nine times greater than the average for the rest of the world.
- America uses about 15 times more energy per person than does the typical developing country.
Here are some interesting but meaningless facts:
Mindfully.org, Consumption by the United States
On average, one American consumes as much energy as
- 2 Japanese
- 6 Mexicans
- 13 Chinese
- 31 Indians
- 128 Bangladeshis
- 307 Tanzanians
- 370 Ethiopians
So Average Joe American uses as much energy as 370 Ethiopians, so what? What the hell do Ethiopians contribute to the world? Nothing but more Ethiopians who consume the Earth's oxygen, beg us for money, food, and medicine and then bad mouth us for helping them.
We deserve to use more resources. It is Americans who have contributed the most in medicine, physics, and chemistry (38% of all Nobel Prizes); we are the most generous people on this planet; when there is a disaster somewhere on this planet, the world expects the US to help (1).
OPEC Countries with gazillions of dollars of oil revenues donated diddlysquat. Perhaps that's why Arabs introduced the concept of zero (from the Hindus) to the Western world: so they could give zip in humanitarian aid.
We contribute more to the world than we get back; if the world was fair we'd be consuming 75% of the world's resources and no one dare complain. When the rest of the world bitches about it it's because they are ungrateful wretches - without America the world would still be living in 1910 (although it should be noted that Muslim countries still live in 632 A.D.).
Related:
SFGate, 9 May 2008, UN to resume food aid flights to Myanmar
The United Nations says it will resume food aid flights to Myanmar on Saturday.
It also forecasts heavy rains next week in the country already devastated by a cyclone.
The U.N. food program says it will send two planes with goods to feed hungry survivors. The World Food Program had suspended help after Myanmar's junta seized U.N. aid shipments headed for hungry and homeless survivors.
I wonder if the United Nations Human Rights Council will officially condemn the junta or will it blame Israel for somehow causing the natural disaster?
ENDNOTES
(1):
An Ol’ Broad’s Ramblings, Who is Selfish?
The overwhelming bulk of the burden in feeding the world’s starving poor remains with the United States and a small group of other predominately Western nations, a situation that the WFP [United Nations World Food Program] has done little so far to change, even as it has asked for another $775 million in donations to ease the crisis.
...
Donor listings on WFP’s website show that this year, as in every year since 1999, the U.S. is far and away the biggest aid provider to WFP. Since 2001, U.S. donations to the food agency have averaged more than $1.16 billion annually — or more than five times as much as the next biggest donor, the European Commission.
