A good way to keep track of all resources on this planet
It is a known fact that may resources on this planet are renewable. Wood, water, food, and energy sources like wind and solar can either be regrown, replenished, or are generally always available. There is something else though. Not even mentioning resources that are finite like coal, oil, natural gas, and minerals, we still are approaching or have already reached a point where there is a strain on the renewables. Humanity is always expanding, therefore limiting how much land is available for renewables to regenerate or we are speeding past the rate of consumption vs. replenishment.
The solution would be to create a universal resource monitor. This tool would be accessible to all. Companies, people, countries, and all other entities, would count all assets that they own, organize them into categories, and send data to a central database that would keep track of all this. This data would be analyzed, interpreted, and broken down into industries, items, products, and raw materials. It would then be fed back to a public app or website. At first, it might be difficult to calculate all of the resources that the world has. All manufactured products would be the easiest, since all material to create those items is listed somewhere. All natural resources would take longer, as there are only estimates. This would happen over time for all items on this planet. In the beginning, there could be a subsection of usable or discovered resources while the total amounts are calculated. This would allow us to go off of the information that we have and not over budget, while we continue to gather all known data about the planet’s total resources and constantly adjust.
From people to companies, anyone could have access to this data. Humanity would be more aware of how our world is doing and how their purchases are affecting the planet and companies would directly benefit by seeing how their businesses are consuming resources. Many metrics could be constructed from such raw data and the analytical possibilities are limitless. All humans on the planet have a responsibility to preserve, conserve, and respect the environment. This would provide us with a real time metric of how we are doing as a species.
The inspiration comes from video games that are in the real time strategy category. Here, players have resource calculators, and based on this data, they can get an overview of what they can and cannot construct, what additional assets can be purchased, or what playable units can be created. This strictly limits any way to use resources that are simply not there or endanger the set rate of consumption vs. replenishment. Even though the resources in games are fictional, they provide a possible solution for our real world.
[7/09/2021]
