Demonstrating need for effective use of resources

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.

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.

1. 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.

1. Setting supply and demand requirements for economic goods
2. Increasing use of resources
3. Demonstrating

1. Increasing efficient use of marine living resources for food

1. Requiring use of resources
2. Reducing lifestyle overdemand on resources
3. Planning development of natural resources
4. Intensifying existing resource use
5. Improving allocation of resources
6. Controlling use of natural resources
7. Appropriating relevant technologies

1. Managing energy resources
2. Extracting natural resources

1. Inefficient use of resources

1. Unused
2. Underuse
3. Overefficient
4. Overeffective
5. Inefficiency
6. Abuse