Business and Economics

Here’s a cute business opportunity. Parking lots are mostly dead spaces located beside intense human activity. People eat food at most of these locations. Putting a cover on parking lots and growing food on that space would make consumers happy! Cars would stay cool in the summer, warm in the winter and dry when it rains. Oh yes, I almost forgot - so would the humans.

Think of a shopping mall. The consumers get out of their cars, shop and return to their cars. If it raining, the consumers end their shopping experience with wet clothes and wet merchandise. Would you prefer to return to your car without freezing, cooking or getting soaked?

In this sense, covered parking areas would be a feature for any mall or business. A competitive edge for shopping malls in a competitive business. You wouldn’t need to explain anything to consumers. The first time they walk back to their cars in comfort during a snow storm, a rain storm or a cooking hot day - they will notice something to remember the next time they are making a decision about their shopping destination.

The environmental impact is just a bonus.

1. Food would be grown where it is consumed. This would reduce shipping costs and pollution. It would reduce waste caused by food being damaged in transit and handling.

2. Cars would not be cooking hot in the summer. Cars would not be freezing cold and covered with snow in the winter. This would reduce the gas used by car air conditioning systems.

3. Cars would be safer. A driver in a cooking hot car or a freezing cold car is a driver that is not in a good driving environment.

4. Congestion on highways and city roads would be reduced. Growing food beside shopping malls and businesses would get tens of thousands of trucks off the road.

5. You could grow flowers, food and provide outdoor eating areas which are looking onto green space instead of a dead ocean of cars. Would you rather have lunch looking at a green park or a stinky parking lot?

6. Cars would last longer. Keeping cars out of the sun and freezing cold would reduce the wear and tear on vehicules.

7. Cleaner air in cities. The covered parking areas would keep huge areas all over a city cooler in the summer. The outdoor park areas would soak toxins out of the air in cities and provide oxygen where it is needed.

8. Lighting could be provided by strips of skylights running down the lanes.

9. All of the parking lots in North America could be covered within a few of years. It is a simple thing to do and capital costs can be written down over an extended period of time.

If you like the idea, then just tell the people at the service desk of the mall where shop.

At the company where you work, tell the director of marketing. Green is good for goodwil and it creates free buzz. The marketing director will understand that the value of the free publicity may actually exceed the costs of construction!

So, something to think about the next time you go to the mall and get soaked? Something that will come to mind when you walk into a business situation drenched by the walk from the car to the door?

As food commodity prices keep rising there may be a general sentiment that better farming technology can solve the problem. Opinions vary about the impact of the things like the Ethanol to fuel strategy. The real problem is that the technology we use destroys topsoil permanently.

The link to ERDO about topsoil is an article (although heavily biased) that provides a working overview of the numbers (including some from the UN FAO): ERDO Topsoil

I’ve been noticing the topsoil annihilation problem from the air, from the water and from the ground in my travels over the last few decades. Other factors, like wide-spread radioactive contamination of topsoil by use of artillery piercing shells and bombs (ie radioactive bombs), have gone without even a blip in the North American media. When I heard about the Terminator seed technology (their name!), I figured that it was basically end-game.

There are many theories about why empires collapse. Most of these revolve around war, irresponsible fiscal polices, printing fiat money and technological quantum leaps. All of these are factors, of course.

The only decisive thing that I can find to mark the end of empires is the exhaustion of topsoil in the country that is the base of the empire. Cutting trees to plant food starts the topsoil erosion process. The population grows and start to cut deeper into their forests for fuel and building materials. More topsoil erosion occurs - now becoming erosion in places that take hundreds of years to regenerate topsoil. As the topsoil gets exhausted, animals become the only productive food source and they graze until there is literally no topsoil left. The base country becomes dependent on imports and violence to secure those imports. Sound familiar?

The craggy highlands of Scotland were once dense forests. The barren hills of Greece were once covered in trees. Once the topsoil is gone, it takes a tremendous effort to get it back. And the empire collapses.

Technological farming techniques (chemicals and gentech) have brought the farming land of the world to the point of collapse. Fertilizers don’t just provide food for plants. Fertilizers burn the soil - destroying all of the organisms that create new topsoil. Climate change is also increasing the rate of desertification. The topsoil disappears.

According to the article, in 4 years (2012), the soil (overall) will be so poor and so thin that not even chemicals will be able to make food grow.

It is not a local phenomenon this time. It is the farmland of the entire world.

The business implications are obvious. Unless something changes, food prices will continue to rise and the security industry will flourish. In the past, this wasn’t such a big deal. The weapons that small, isolated groups could produce were not powerful enough to contaminate and destroy all human beings.

I don’t think that it is a total coincidence that Jane’s Information Group announced a new service on October 1st , 2007 : Jane’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Assessments Intelligence Center (JCBRN). For now, we are just at the food riot stage.

I’ve often said that one day everybody will wake up realize that it is all just a food fight. What will you do when you have to pay $15 for a loaf of bread - in a few years?

Perhaps seawater farming will be able to help? Perhaps cold fusion will get invented in the next couple of years? Perhaps these things will be blocked like all of the other sensible (and economically positive!) ideas for improving productivity and reducing structural risk in the system (aka capitalism)? Right now, with the USA running their economy and their stock markets like a casino (and nothing to show for their troubles except a huge pile of debt and an even bigger pile of incredibly dangerous weapons), well, we shall see what we shall see.

The world is incredibly small. You (or anybody else) could be on the other side of this planet within roughly 18 hours on commercially scheduled aircraft. Pollution in the air moves just about as fast. That’s a small planet.

It all kind of lends a new meaning to the old expression : Do the math?

Imagine this : you hear a rumor or you have a hunch. How to scan the world news fast? You can use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN. But they filter too much. Search results for the common schmuck.

Your time is money, things are moving fast and you need better than Google gaga? How about this at-a-glance, big picture, don’t leave out a potentially useful piece of the puzzle, need-it-now kind of web page. Try the Wall Street Executive Library.

I’ve nicknamed the web site Wall Street Executive Library with my own name : Wall Street XL. You can find all kinds of quality information extremely quickly. It is a ‘Best of the Web’ web site. It is listed on the left under the link category ‘A Start’ (with all due apologies to the web site - I wouldn’t want anybody to mix up the emotional load of the Windows Start button with the fast, smooth and efficient organization of their web page!)

Why the nickname? Why ‘A Start’ (if it could cause confusion?) Well, there is a deep and mysterious, conspiracy theory quality reason for this which only the initiated can learn under a full moon (more or less) : the full name is too long for my web page sidebar and the categories are sorted alphabetically. One more for the X-files?

Some other links that may be useful to you are our ‘Backstage’ and ‘Data’ Links on the left.

Salt water farming could solve 2 of the world’s biggest problems. Food and energy. It could turn the desert green. You’ve probably noticed that there is a lot of salt water in the world. There are edible plants that grow in salt water.

In 1996, CNN published an article called Salt water could by key to greener world. The article, however, misses a couple of very important points.

First, you can make ethanol with almost any biomass. In the article, they mention one example : “The main crop is salicornia, which can provide more high-quality vegetable oil per plant than soybeans.” Oil from plants like this could be used to create biodiesel and ethanol.

Second, there is a by-product of any farming operation - topsoil. The organic ‘waste’ from the the farming operation could be used to start reforestation projects along coastlines of the world that are now completely barren due to human destruction of trees and topsoil. Those trees could eventually be used for building.

With all these advantages you would think that governments and companies would be excited about the idea.

Instead, they bury it. Instead of this sensible idea, we get things like the stupidity of tax-payer subsidized corn based ethanol.

If you are looking for a business opportunity that is not constrained by political, social, economic, or physical resources then I suggest you take a look at the salt water farming companies. They are currently privately held companies. Their IPOs will be huge.

Here is a list of companies to get started with : Seawater Farms

During the World Wars people grew Victory Gardens. Despite the initial resistance of governments to the idea, Victory Gardens became a very efficient and powerful weapon for supporting the war effort. From the Wikipedia article : “These gardens produced up to 40 percent of all the vegetable produce consumed nationally.” and “Our food is fighting”.

Today we see something outrageous. The Bush/Republican Ethanol strategy for the USA. This use of using corn for making ethanol (instead of much more efficient alternatives) has driven up the price of food in the entire world in a dramatic way. The idea is ridiculous and the predictable side-effects of this policy are almost criminal.

Environmentalists need to help fight Bush’s Ethanol Surge (despite the title) has a very nice summary of the situation. It’s from the web site Energy Bulletin.

The really wild part of it is this : the US could dramatically reduce their energy needs with simple and known ideas. Here is just one article from the Natural Resources Defense Council called Reducing U.S. Oil Dependence that outlines just a few of the ideas that could be used.

So, where are we today? Food riots, food hoarding and secret deals between governments to secure food supplies. An article yesterday (April 10, 2008) in the Financial Times (Europe edition) called Nations make secret deals over grain outlines a few details and offers this quote “Food prices have risen on average by 45 per cent since last summer, according to the United Nations’ FAO.”

Now, what would happen if people (in countries that have suburbs) started turning their ‘consumption only’ lawns into food gardens? Better food, lower food prices, good for the environment, better trade balance.

We will see Victory Gardens starting to spring up all over North America now. If fact, the Victory Garden business is a good investment opportunity.

And here is the key point : instead of wasting money on lawns full of toxic pesticides and herbicides that needs manpower and pollution to be ‘cut’ every week, that same land could be producing healthy food with no more time or money invested.

The aristocrats of old Europe had lawns and flower gardens to show off their wealth. At a time when nobody except aristocrats could own land, they were just bragging that they had so much land that they could afford to play with it. The middle class picked up on this idea and here we are today with acres of stupid lawns and poor people experiencing food insecurity.

Everybody asks this question : It is simple to reduce oil dependence, improve food security and correct the trade balance. So, what is blocking sensible policies and promoting (read: hyping and marketing) completely senseless, unnecessary and destructive policies?

I suggest you can find your answer in this question : Why do you use your yard for a lawn and not for growing food?