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This answer pertains to buying in the United States and is the story of my first purchase. Hope it helps.IntroAs professionals in the art and design field, we have lived frugally for years. Our first jobs brought us to very expensive cities like San Francisco and Boston where owning a home was financially out of reach. A 20% down payment needed to get into a modest home in Boston was $120,000. We focused on saving as much as possible while living in apartments above and below all sorts of characters. Once our children were born, the creativity required to make apartments work went into overdrive. With our first child, Mom and the baby slept in the 1 bedroom while hubs slept on a mattress in the hall next to the front door. When our second child was born, we moved to a bigger apartment. This worked well until Mom got her first two children’s book illustration deals and needed a room with a door to keep children from the paints and expensive scanner. This time Hubs had to sleep in the living room while Mom and new baby got the bedroom and toddler baby got the second bedroom. As they grew to sleep through the night, Hubs moved back into the bedroom but one of the babies had to move their pack-and-play into the bathroom at night. Add to these constraints the lack of yard and long commutes and suddenly moving for a new job in a more family friendly location seemed like a good idea.We decided to take a position in Money's #1 best place to live in 2018, Frisco TX, USA, a suburb of Dallas (Frisco, Texas Is No. 1 on MONEY's Best Places to Live list). The state is experiencing the fastest growth in the US for the last 20 years with jobs projected to grow by nearly 15% over the next four years, according to Moody’s Analytics. But growth alone is not what makes Frisco the best place to live in America. Rather, it’s the way the city has translated its growth into a higher quality of life. For example: Frisco’s outstanding public schools have the highest graduation rate of all the cities and towns MONEY evaluated this year. The average commute and home prices are each half of what we experienced in Boston.8 months after arriving, we purchased our first home. Despite our best efforts to research, inspect, and read every document in the home buying process, we were deeply disappointed to find out essential information had been withheld from us until after we signed. Here is how to avoid making the same mistake.Top 10 listFind out about “fracking.”See where oil companies are drilling around you: https://www.drillingmaps.com/map.htmlLearn the concept of “split estate” and how homebuilders retain mineral rights with minimal disclosure https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport/special-report-u-s-builders-hoard-mineral-rights-under-new-homes-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009 .Know that most title companies, realtors, and inspectors aren’t required to tell you if a property is a split estate and won’t because it may reduce willingness to buy. Only “Landmen” search these. Consider talking to one before you start home searching.Estimate the effect of fracking on your property value: http://www.resource-media.org/drilling-vs-the-american-dream-fracking-impacts-on-property-rights-and-home-values/Understand the health risks: https://www.denverpost.com/2012/03/19/cu-denver-study-links-fracking-to-higher-concentration-of-air-pollutants/ , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409103920.htmKnow if the state will force you to allow fracking through “forced pooling.” http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx.Fracking in urban areas is a growing issue. See notes below for more of our story and a guide to help you.Get the mortgage first: Mortgage companies will only give you a good rate if you already have a lower offer from another provider. Each of these quotes takes over 1 hour of your time to fill out paperwork, and that doesn’t include the time the mortgage company needs to make a decision. If you want to make multiple companies compete on price for your business, plan to spend 10 hours filling out forms online and taking their phone calls. Do this before you search for your dream house. You really don’t have time to do this during the tight deadlines of closing unless you make it a part time job. Mortgage companies want to limit your ability to rate shop. Start early to make sure you get a competitive rate. An effective strategy is to get a low quote from an online-only lender and then bring it to a more established bank and ask them to beat the price. Remember, most banks only compete with written offers.Know the good school districts. Tools like Zillow are great for finding homes but often produce misleading information. At the time of this writing, Zillow and other tools like it allow you to search for homes by the quality of schools, except they don’t know what school your homes are assigned. Zillow takes the closest schools to your home and assumes they are the ones your children will go to in that home. This may not be correct. That is why Zillow school listings have an (unassigned) next to them. Go to https://www.greatschools.org to get the real answer.Tell your mortgage broker, and realtor up front that you will not attend a closing unless you get all the paperwork 48 hours in advance. At closing they will expect you to sign ~ 200 pages. We asked our folks to get us the paperwork a day before closing and they sent 10% of it. We reviewed it and everything looked fine. Unaware that the entire packet was much larger and contained a lot of complex info like leans on the property, clauses in the mortgage, and disclaimers about frakers depreciating the value of your home, we showed up. Once you are in the room, there is a lot of pressure to get everything signed. We asked for 2 hours to read the documents but the realtor, mortgage agent, and title agent sat at the table tapping their pens waiting for us to finish reading. Thinking this would only take 20 minutes, we scheduled work meeting for later in the day. Not the best environment to have important conversations about the deal. This is where most people find out about huge issues like “split estates” (see #1). The industry pros know buyers will feel too far down the road to figure out what that means and just sign the deal. Don’t let it happen to you. Set expectations up front.Inspectors. As soon as you make an offer on a house and it is accepted, you are on a short clock to do all your diligence. Inspectors are people you pay to make sure issues are found. We needed several but didn’t know it. Get names ahead of time so you can have them ready. We ended up needing all of our inspectors on 12 hrs notice because of a holiday. You end up working with people who are available, not necessarily who’s the best.General inspector who reviews the entire house. Make sure they take good photos of everything that is an issue. Our home owner had a large squirrel problem in her attic for years and didn’t believe us that it would take thousands of dollars to repair until she saw the inspection photos of the chewed wiring, insulation, hole in roof and poop everywhere. Be there in person for the inspection. When they are done, they will generate a list of issues that is often over 100 lines long. You won’t know what is actually important and what isn’t. Before they leave the house, ask them to highlight the things that are big issues that should really be fixed. It will make prioritizing your repairs a lot easier.Pests and termites.Heating, electrical, and air conditioning. The home we were buying was 25 years old with all equipment original. The HVAC tech was able to estimate the expected life span of each piece. This helped us negotiate with the seller and prioritize a repair budget.Foundation. In Texas, the soil is clay and shifts a lot. This breaks the foundation of homes with regularity. A “foundation engineer” did measurements to help us know if a big repair was in our future. Luckily, it wasn’t.Homeowners agreement (HOA). If you are moving into a developer community, they likely have an HOA. In Texas these associations have the ability to take your house if they want to. So you have to make them happy. When we asked for a copy of the HOA document, nobody had one. Not the seller, not our friends in the neighborhood, not the HOA rep on the architecture board. Make sure you have an HOA document review as one of your contingencies. Finally someone produced the digital document. It was over 200 pages and completely unreadable with legalize. Worse yet, the PDF wasn’t searchable. It was just a scan of the original paper documents. A large section of the paperwork was scanned twice making the document even harder to read. The best way to deal with this seemed to be to open it in Adobe Acrobat, and then try to turn on character recognition making a searchable PDF. Buying an apartment in a big building is different than buying a single home in a community. We wanted to know if they would let us rent the property, use AirBnb, change the lawn, move our fence. Some of these HOAs are very restrictive. Ours recently updated their policy to include 16 colors we could paint our front door. Also, the city of Frisco required that 80% of our lawn be grass. We were thinking of putting in a waterless desert garden but I guess that’s out.Homeowners association. You need to know if the homeowner association has any problems with the existing house they will want you as a new owner to fix. One of our friends bought a house, and then the HOA told them they didn’t like the shingles and required them to replace the entire roof. This was about $5,000. The Title company should have caught this but didn’t. Make sure to check.“Landmen.” These are the people who search records to determine if you own mineral rights to the property. That is what allows oil companies to frack under you (see “forced pooling” in #1). If this is important to you, seek them out before you find a house to understand what is true in your area. None of the people we paid including our real estate agent, inspectors, mortgage agents and title company ever disclosed we might not own our mineral rights. Even after closing, we still don’t know.Now you are ready to search for a house. The steps above should let you know what area is best for you to look for homes. Hopefully away from fracking, in good schools, with a mortgage APR that you can use to estimate how much you can afford. We found Zillow/Realtor.com to be the best for searching options. Our practice was to look through everything online, make a short list, and then tour with agents. We asked the agents to search homes for us but didn’t find they spent enough time to actually find what we were looking for. They missed obvious stuff like a big backyard and good schools. However, they were great at spotting potential issues with a home during tour like a bulging foundation, water damage was that covered up, re-sellability etc…Offer. Know the amount of repair costs you can deduct from the initial offer. Our strategy was to search during the off season where there would be less options but seller might be willing to offer better prices. We started in Oct and closed in November. In determining our offer price, our real estate agent made a detailed report of similar homes in the neighborhood to determine what was fair. The seller’s agent did something similar but included homes that were not similar to ours and cost more because they backed onto a lucious golf course. Watch out for this. We offered near asking because the price was fair, but a little less because we knew it would need repairs. The seller waited a week to have another open house hoping to get more offers before accepting ours. We didn’t negotiate much at that time because the weather had been bad for the two open houses the seller had, likely keeping potential buyers away. We felt that if we negotiated hard at that point, the seller would just hold a third open house and find someone else to start a bidding war. What we didn’t know was that this isn’t the real offer. You have to get inspections and then negotiate price again. What is important to know is that certain states have a rule that the price negotiated after inspection has to be within a certain range of the original price. In Texas we were later told the maximum drop in price could be 6%. As with many big things in the home buying process, no one told us about this beforehand. Because our house was fairly well kept up, the repairs we needed fell inside this 6% window. If the home had needed something larger like a new roof, heater, air conditioners… we would have been in trouble. You can also put in conditions of the deal. If they aren’t met, the deal doesn’t go through. We made contingencies out of getting the HOA documents, foundation repair warranty, and satellite dishes were taken down from the roof and HOA association good standing.Inspections. As discussed above, knowing the inspections you want, including Landmen and having them scheduled ahead of time will make a big difference. it is possible to have everyone there at the same time. General, HVAC, Pest, Foundation folks can all come at 9am and be done by noon. Make sure to speak with each before leaving to make a short list of the big issues they found. It makes prioritizing your repairs much easier.Closing. As stated above, there are two big things to know. 1) The title company does the closing and it is their job to make sure nobody else has a right to the land. However, they are probably only looking above the grass. Our title company made no effort to assess mineral rights and didn’t tell us that was not part of their service. The bank made us sign a piece of paper saying we understood that a mining company may or may not be able to frack underneath us and that we would be responsible for partial or complete damage to the property as a result. Well, we were not aware and didn’t like the sound of that. 2) the title company will likely have over 200 pages for you to sign. Get this ahead of of the meeting so you can read everything and ask questions. I recommend 48 hours. The signing meeting isn’t a great place to get answers and possibly pull out of the deal. Our title company sent us 20 pages ahead of time and we thought that was the complete package. it wasn’t. There was not mortgage information, survey reports, title documents etc… Make sure they know you won’t come unless you have it all ahead of time. There is a high probability they will tell you the documents will arrive ahead of time and then not deliver. Plan to have a push-back signing date. At closing, ask the title agent to introduce buyer and seller by email so you can ask any questions and return any security deposits you might hold from their lease back.Move-in/out. In this area, it is common for seller to rent the home back to buyers for a certain number of days to move back. They pay your mortgage prorated by days. You also commonly hold onto a security deposit. Make sure to get the title company to introduce buyer and seller by email so you can make arrangements to return the money.More details worth knowing about “fracking” when you buy a new home.As first time home buyers, we assumed that buying a home meant buying the rights to use it above and below the ground. If we didn’t have those rights, we assumed someone would be required to tell us. We selected our location with the safety of our children in mind. At no time in the buying process did anyone tell us that it is now common for homes to be sold as “split estates” where regular people like us own the rights above the grass, and someone else owns the “mineral rights” below the grass. Not owning mineral rights means someone else can set up an oil well and “frack” under your property at any time without telling you. We assumed that this wasn’t a concern in urban areas like Frisco anyway because so many people lived there. Not true. “Fracking” in urban areas is the new trend. Urban cities like Denver Colorado, Naples Florida, Las Angeles California and Dallas Texas are experiencing a boom in “fracking” within a baseball’s throw to homes and schools. Home builders across America including D.R. Horton, Ryland Group Inc, Beazer Homes USA Inc and PulteGroup Inc have been hoarding mineral rights under new homes as the US. Reuters reviewed county property records in 25 states. The story caused two Attorney Generals in Florida and North Carolina to investigate deceptive sales practices resulting in D.R. Horton, the largest home builder in the US to give rights back to many of its customers. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport/special-report-u-s-builders-hoard-mineral-rights-under-new-homes-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009 Look at this map https://www.drillingmaps.com/map.html. Although there are no wells currently in Frisco, Denton, the neighboring country has over 5,000 drilled wells pumping out 2,000 barrels of oil a month. There are over 280 wells within city limits including one next to the local college football stadium http://www.texas-drilling.com/denton-county.Think the government will never let this happen in your area? The residents of Denton decided they didn’t want any more fracking and passed a law restricting it. Within a year the state governor passed House Bill 40 making it illegal for homeowners to ristrict frackers https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33140732, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/22/denton-texas-banned-fracking-. Here is a great example of how the process works. Former Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm is in a lawsuit between jilted gas driller Trinity East and the City of Dallas over “Special Use Permits” for gas drilling in prohibited areas in return for $19 million in upfront leasing payments. The citizens of Dallas had formed a committee who had already voted “no” on allowing the permits. Yet those votes were overturned during a surprise re-vote in another meeting. https://www.downwindersatrisk.org/2016/01/witness-for-the-defense-wherein-we-go-to-bat-for-mary-suhm/Think the Federal Government has regulatory oversight of fracking to ensure public safety? In 2005, Congress passed a law prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from safeguarding drinking water that might be harmed by fracking. The law also allows oil companies to keep secret the long list of chemicals they pump into the ground as part of the fracking process. This was made possible by a study commissioned by the federal government to assess the dangers of fracking. The study was done by overseen by Cadmus, a research firm in Massachusetts. They had difficulty assessing the impact of fracking on the local water supply because the the oil and gas industry declined to provide information about the fracking fluids they used, asserting that they were trade secrets. There wasn’t enough time or money for Cadmus to begin monitoring groundwater before, during and after fracking jobs to see if the process affected water quality. As a result, they concluded that fracking posed a risk to drinking water and another study with better design was needed to determine how much. The federal government changed the conclusion to say fracking posed no risk to drinking water. The Cadmus scientists who did the research disagreed. Chi Ho Sham, the team’s group manager said “the data and analyses tell us there is risk associated with it, and we were asked to report there is no risk, and we can’t say that.” The Cadmus group had their company's name and their own removed from the final document. Immediately after the report’s publication, Weston Wilson from the EPA’s Denver office filed a formal whistleblower complaint. The EPA’s inspector general launched an investigation into Wilson’s complaint -- but closed it after Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005, codifying the misleading conclusion of the study https://www.dallasnews.com/news/environment/2017/12/05/water-tainted-fracking-scientists-said-safe-now-say-censored. If not for this loophole, the EPA could have developed standards for the entire country. State rules could have been tougher, but not weaker, than the national standards, and if states failed to regulate effectively, citizens could have petitioned the federal government to intervene. Without it, citizens have little recourse in opposing the laws that enhanced fracker’s ability to operate without oversight. Examples include:Resource Conservation and Recovery Act 42 U.S.C. 6921(B)(2) exempts oils and gas companies from proper disposal of the hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste generated during production as identified in the EPA's 1987 report.Clean air act 112(n)(4)-42 U.S.C 7412 (n)(4). Oil and Gas companies are exempt from adhering to limits on hazardous air pollutants like benzene that the US recognizes as dangerous.Clean air act 402(I)(2)-33 U.S.C 1342(I)(2). Oil and Gas companies are exempt from the requirement of planning how they will protect toxic runoff from contaminating surface water, streams and wetlands. https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2017/11/22/special-report-how-the-u-s-government-hid-frackings-risks-to-drinking-water/This all this is a lot of fuss about nothing? Exxon CEO and board chairman Rex Tillerson, head of the world’s largest drilling company is suing to stop construction of a water tower that would supply nearby drilling operations because of the “constant and unbearable nuisance” that would come from having “lights on at all hours of the night …traffic at unreasonable hours … noise from mechanical and electrical equipment” http://www.resource-media.org/drilling-vs-the-american-dream-fracking-impacts-on-property-rights-and-home-values/. Read the full suit here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/water20140220.pdf.Think all this fracking only happens in Texas? Weld County, a suburban community for Denver commuters is the fourth-fastest growing community in the nation. Like Frisco Texas it’s economy, quality of life is high, and jobs are plentiful. As population in the area is expected to double by 2050, drilling applications in the state have risen 70 percent in just a year. Oil rigs are going in near high priced homes and schools, causing health issues and large drops in realestate prices https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/colorado-fracking-debates.html. Residents fought back with a ban on fracking near their homes and schools, but like in Texas, they were denied by a ruling at the state level https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/colorado-court-strikes-down-local-bans-on-fracking.html?module=inline. Worse, Colorado has a law that forces homeowners who own their mineral rights but don’t want oil companies to frack near them. This law requires the homeowner to pay a penalty in the form of the full cost of equipment and operating costs for the well as well as a 200% fee based on the costs of oil rig exploration. Lots of other states have similar laws http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx.Another story in Frederick, Colorado, a suburb 30 minutes from Denver and Boulder illustrates the future of other communities. Home owners in an expensive subdivision left for a weekend trip and came back to find a 142-foot-tall drill rig in the backyard. Notice the photos of the well around the playground. https://grist.org/climate-energy/the-fracking-rig-next-door-photos/. Nearby Red Hawk Elementary School has a well going up 350 feet from where its second-graders play. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/fracking-colorado-school-vexes-residents_n_1575733.html , https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2012/04/03/degette-urges-epa-to-consider-potential-health-threats-from-gas-drilling-operations/ , https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2012/06/04/colorado-kids-to-encana-dont-frack-our-schools/. http://www.dailycamera.com/erie-news/ci_20126684/noaa-study-erie-gas-drilling-moratorium-fracking-propane-butane. A Colorado court has invalidated a local ban on fracking by towns who don’t want it https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/colorado-court-strikes-down-local-bans-on-fracking.html?module=inline .A University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Health study this year showed that people living within a half-mile of oil-and-gas fracking operations were exposed to air pollutants five times above U.S. hazard standards. The cancer risk estimate of 8.3 per 10,000 for populations living within 500 feet of an oil and gas facility exceeded the U.S. EPA's 1 in 10,000 upper threshold, according to study published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/03/19/cu-denver-study-links-fracking-to-higher-concentration-of-air-pollutants/ , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409103920.htmWhat about Cary North Carolina, #5 on Money's best places to live list of 2018? Cary is with the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill “triangle” and is home to Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill where Michael Jordan got his start. The economy has been booming for years thanks to a decades long tax plan designed to attract businesses http://time.com/money/collection/2018-best-places-to-live/5361443/cary-north-carolina-2/. Lots of people move their from NY for a better family life. What new residents don’t typically know is that energy companies have been anxious to frack near the most densely populated area of the state. A large band expected to produce profitable energy lays at the top of Wake County, right under the city of Durham https://rafiusa.org/issues/landowner-rights-and-fracking/fracking-map-in-nc/. That means frackers could soon be underneath Cary. Even more alarming, North Carolina has a policy called “forced pooling” which, gives the state the right to compel a homeowner who owns their own mineral rights and does not want oil companies to frack underneath them into allowing oil companies to frack. In most states, this requires that a certain percentage of surrounding land already be leased voluntarily. In North Carolina, current law does not specify the percentage of land that must be voluntarily leased in a given area https://rafiusa.org/issues/landowner-rights-and-fracking/forced-pooling/. North Carolina is still deciding how to work with energy companies. More about its land formations and fracking opportunities can be seen in the map at the bottom of this page: https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Energy%20Mineral%20and%20Land%20Resources/Geological%20Survey/Oil%20and%20Gas%20Research/NCGS%20OFR2013-01%20Reid%20and%20Taylor.pdf.DisclaimerHope my experience is helpful to you. This is my first home purchase so there are likely many important things left of this list I do not know or understand. I am not a real estate professional of any kind and do not represent myself, or this post as having correct information. It is simply the story of my first home purchase. Please consult a qualified professional when purchasing a home.

There’ll always be bureaucrats and they’ll still be trying to boss the robots around.What Happens to Society When Robots Replace Workers?Almost one-fifth of the time spent in US workplaces involves performing physical activities or operating machinery in a predictable environment: workers carry out specific actions in well-known settings where changes are relatively easy to anticipate. Through the adaptation and adoption of currently available technologies, we estimate the technical feasibility of automating such activities at 78 percent, the highest of our seven top-level categories (Exhibit 2). Since predictable physical activities figure prominently in sectors such as manufacturing, food service and accommodations, and retailing, these are the most susceptible to automation based on technical considerations alone.Exhibit 2In manufacturing, for example, performing physical activities or operating machinery in a predictable environment represents one-third of the workers’ overall time. The activities range from packaging products to loading materials on production equipment to welding to maintaining equipment. Because of the prevalence of such predictable physical work, some 59 percent of all manufacturing activities could be automated, given technical considerations. The overall technical feasibility, however, masks considerable variance. Within manufacturing, 90 percent of what welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers do, for example, has the technical potential for automation, but for customer-service representatives that feasibility is below 30 percent. The potential varies among companies as well. Our work with manufacturers reveals a wide range of adoption levels—from companies with inconsistent or little use of automation all the way to quite sophisticated users.Manufacturing, for all its technical potential, is only the second most readily automatable sector in the US economy. A service sector occupies the top spot: accommodations and food service, where almost half of all labor time involves predictable physical activities and the operation of machinery—including preparing, cooking, or serving food; cleaning food-preparation areas; preparing hot and cold beverages; and collecting dirty dishes. According to our analysis, 73 percent of the activities workers perform in food service and accommodations have the potential for automation, based on technical considerations.Some of this potential is familiar. Automats, or automated cafeterias, for example, have long been in use. Now restaurants are testing new, more sophisticated concepts, like self-service ordering or even robotic servers. Solutions such as Momentum Machines’ hamburger-cooking robot, which can reportedly assemble and cook 360 burgers an hour, could automate a number of cooking and food-preparation activities. But while the technical potential for automating them might be high, the business case must take into account both the benefits and the costs of automation, as well as the labor-supply dynamics discussed earlier. For some of these activities, current wage rates are among the lowest in the United States, reflecting both the skills required and the size of the available labor supply. Since restaurant employees who cook earn an average of about $10 an hour, a business case based solely on reducing labor costs may be unconvincing.Retailing is another sector with a high technical potential for automation. We estimate that 53 percent of its activities are automatable, though, as in manufacturing, much depends on the specific occupation within the sector. Retailers can take advantage of efficient, technology-driven stock management and logistics, for example. Packaging objects for shipping and stocking merchandise are among the most frequent physical activities in retailing, and they have a high technical potential for automation. So do maintaining records of sales, gathering customer or product information, and other data-collection activities. But retailing also requires cognitive and social skills. Advising customers which cuts of meat or what color shoes to buy requires judgment and emotional intelligence. We calculate that 47 percent of a retail salesperson’s activities have the technical potential to be automated—far less than the 86 percent possible for the sector’s bookkeepers, accountants, and auditing clerks.As we noted above, however, just because an activity can be automated doesn’t mean that it will be—broader economic factors are at play. The jobs of bookkeepers, accountants, and auditing clerks, for example, require skills and training, so they are scarcer than basic cooks. But the activities they perform cost less to automate, requiring mostly software and a basic computer.Considerations such as these have led to an observed tendency for higher rates of automation for activities common in some middle-skill jobs—for example, in data collection and data processing. As automation advances in capability, jobs involving higher skills will probably be automated at increasingly high rates.The heat map in Exhibit 3 highlights the wide variation in how automation could play out, both in individual sectors and for different types of activities within them.4Exhibit 3Activities and sectors in the middle range for automationAcross all occupations in the US economy, one-third of the time spent in the workplace involves collecting and processing data. Both activities have a technical potential for automation exceeding 60 percent. Long ago, many companies automated activities such as administering procurement, processing payrolls, calculating material-resource needs, generating invoices, and using bar codes to track flows of materials. But as technology progresses, computers are helping to increase the scale and quality of these activities. For example, a number of companies now offer solutions that automate entering paper and PDF invoices into computer systems or even processing loan applications. And it’s not just entry-level workers or low-wage clerks who collect and process data; people whose annual incomes exceed $200,000 spend some 31 percent of their time doing those things, as well.Financial services and insurance provide one example of this phenomenon. The world of finance relies on professional expertise: stock traders and investment bankers live off their wits. Yet about 50 percent of the overall time of the workforce in finance and insurance is devoted to collecting and processing data, where the technical potential for automation is high. Insurance sales agents gather customer or product information and underwriters verify the accuracy of records. Securities and financial sales agents prepare sales or other contracts. Bank tellers verify the accuracy of financial data.As a result, the financial sector has the technical potential to automate activities taking up 43 percent of its workers’ time. Once again, the potential is far higher for some occupations than for others. For example, we estimate that mortgage brokers spend as much as 90 percent of their time processing applications. Putting in place more sophisticated verification processes for documents and credit applications could reduce that proportion to just more than 60 percent. This would free up mortgage advisers to focus more of their time on advising clients rather than routine processing. Both the customer and the mortgage institution get greater value.Other activities in the middle range of the technical potential for automation involve large amounts of physical activity or the operation of machinery in unpredictableenvironments. These types of activities make up a high proportion of the work in sectors such as farming, forestry, and construction and can be found in many other sectors as well.Examples include operating a crane on a construction site, providing medical care as a first responder, collecting trash in public areas, setting up classroom materials and equipment, and making beds in hotel rooms. The latter two activities are unpredictable largely because the environment keeps changing. Schoolchildren leave bags, books, and coats in a seemingly random manner. Likewise, in a hotel room, different guests throw pillows in different places, may or may not leave clothing on their beds, and clutter up the floor space in different ways.These activities, requiring greater flexibility than those in a predictable environment, are for now more difficult to automate with currently demonstrated technologies: their automation potential is 25 percent. Should technology advance to handle unpredictable environments with the same ease as predictable ones, the potential for automation would jump to 67 percent. Already, some activities in less predictable settings in farming and construction (such as evaluating the quality of crops, measuring materials, or translating blueprints into work requirements) are more susceptible to automation.Activities with low technical potential for automationThe hardest activities to automate with currently available technologies are those that involve managing and developing people (9 percent automation potential) or that apply expertise to decision making, planning, or creative work (18 percent). These activities, often characterized as knowledge work, can be as varied as coding software, creating menus, or writing promotional materials. For now, computers do an excellent job with very well-defined activities, such as optimizing trucking routes, but humans still need to determine the proper goals, interpret results, or provide commonsense checks for solutions. The importance of human interaction is evident in two sectors that, so far, have a relatively low technical potential for automation: healthcare and education.Could a machine do your job?Explore our comprehensive data set on Tableau Public.Overall, healthcare has a technical potential for automation of about 36 percent, but the potential is lower for health professionals whose daily activities require expertise and direct contact with patients. For example, we estimate that less than 30 percent of a registered nurse’s activities could be automated, based on technical considerations alone. For dental hygienists, that proportion drops to 13 percent.Nonetheless, some healthcare activities, including preparing food in hospitals and administering non-intravenous medications, could be automated if currently demonstrated technologies were adapted. Data collection, which also accounts for a significant amount of working time in the sector, could become more automated as well. Nursing assistants, for example, spend about two-thirds of their time collecting health information. Even some of the more complex activities that doctors perform, such as administering anesthesia during simple procedures or reading radiological scans, have the technical potential for automation.Of all the sectors we have examined, the technical feasibility of automation is lowest in education, at least for now. To be sure, digital technology is transforming the field, as can be seen from the myriad classes and learning vehicles available online. Yet the essence of teaching is deep expertise and complex interactions with other people. Together, those two categories—the least automatable of the seven identified in the first exhibit—account for about one-half of the activities in the education sector.Even so, 27 percent of the activities in education—primarily those that happen outside the classroom or on the sidelines—have the potential to be automated with demonstrated technologies. Janitors and cleaners, for example, clean and monitor building premises. Cooks prepare and serve school food. Administrative assistants maintain inventory records and personnel information. The automation of these data-collection and processing activities may help to reduce the growth of the administrative expenses of education and to lower its cost without affecting its quality.Looking aheadAs technology develops, robotics and machine learning will make greater inroads into activities that today have only a low technical potential for automation. New techniques, for example, are enabling safer and more enhanced physical collaboration between robots and humans in what are now considered unpredictable environments. These developments could enable the automation of more activities in sectors such as construction. Artificial intelligence can be used to design components in engineer-heavy sectors.One of the biggest technological breakthroughs would come if machines were to develop an understanding of natural language on par with median human performance—that is, if computers gained the ability to recognize the concepts in everyday communication between people. In retailing, such natural-language advances would increase the technical potential for automation from 53 percent of all labor time to 60 percent. In finance and insurance, the leap would be even greater, to 66 percent, from 43 percent. In healthcare, too, while we don’t believe currently demonstrated technologies could accomplish all of the activities needed to diagnose and treat patients, technology will become more capable over time. Robots may not be cleaning your teeth or teaching your children quite yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.As stated at the outset, though, simply considering the technical potential for automation is not enough to assess how much of it will occur in particular activities. The actual level will reflect the interplay of the technical potential, the benefits and costs (or the business case), the supply-and-demand dynamics of labor, and various regulatory and social factors related to acceptability.Leading more automated enterprisesAutomation could transform the workplace for everyone, including senior management. The rapid evolution of technology can make harnessing its potential and avoiding its pitfalls especially complex. In some industries, such as retailing, automation is already changing the nature of competition. E-commerce players, for example, compete with traditional retailers by using both physical automation (such as robots in warehouses) and the automation of knowledge work (including algorithms that alert shoppers to items they may want to buy). In mining, autonomous haulage systems that transport ore inside mines more safely and efficiently than human operators do could also deliver a step change in productivity.Top executives will first and foremost need to identify where automation could transform their own organizations and then put a plan in place to migrate to new business processes enabled by automation. A heat map of potential automation activities within companies can help to guide, identify, and prioritize the potential processes and activities that could be transformed. As we have noted, the key question will be where and how to unlock value, given the cost of replacing human labor with machines. The majority of the benefits may come not from reducing labor costs but from raising productivity through fewer errors, higher output, and improved quality, safety, and speed.It is never too early to prepare for the future. To get ready for automation’s advances tomorrow, executives must challenge themselves to understand the data and automation technologies on the horizon today. But more than data and technological savvy are required to capture value from automation. The greater challenges are the workforce and organizational changes that leaders will have to put in place as automation upends entire business processes, as well as the culture of organizations, which must learn to view automation as a reliable productivity lever. Senior leaders, for their part, will need to “let go” in ways that run counter to a century of organizational development.5Understanding the activities that are most susceptible to automation from a technical perspective could provide a unique opportunity to rethink how workers engage with their jobs and how digital labor platforms can better connect individuals, teams, and projects.6It could also inspire top managers to think about how many of their own activities could be better and more efficiently executed by machines, freeing up executive time to focus on the core competencies that no robot or algorithm can replace—as yet.Could a machine do your job? Find out on Tableau Public, where we analyzed more than 800 occupations to assess the extent to which they could be automated using existing technology.

What suggests global warming is a fake idea?Nothing, Global Warming is real, the earth has been warming since the end of the last age. The fake part is that man’s Co2 is the cause.The UN created the Global Warming Hoax as a means to implement Agenda 21:“The UN jumped on the environmental issue at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, at Stockholm, Sweden. It was organized and led by Canadian, Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the Conference. During this conference, the UN Environment Programme was born, which has worldwide jurisdiction over UN environmental matters. The first Executive Director of UNEP was Maurice Strong.”In comments that laid bare the hidden agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, let slip during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.’s real purpose in pushing climate hysteria is to end capitalism throughout the world:This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism.A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she complained that America’s two-party constitutional system is hampering the U.N.’s climate objectives.The Political Agenda Behind the Man-Made Global Warming MovementThe public promotion of the man-made global warming theory has obviously been extremely political and ideological, not based on genuine rational science. Scare tactics, exaggerated or blatantly false news reports, and the vilification and marginalization of scientists who question man-made global warming are all indicators of a political propaganda campaign.Most importantly, the reports that are issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) have always included a summary that dishonestly represents the findings of the climate scientists whose work these reports are supposed to objectively represent, and it is the summary that governments and the news media pay attention to. Furthermore, some crucial IPCC reports have been based on fraudulent scientific studies, obviously because no real scientific evidence exists to support the theory of man-made global warming. Everything they say is simply based on computer models of the climate system, models which have been shown to be wrong on every prediction.All of this indicates the existence of political agendas behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement that are about issues other than, “saving the world from catastrophic global warming”. However, it is not easy to clearly identify what these political agendas are.The AGW movement has always been mostly a British-American movement. Although some scientists had been investigating the phenomenon of greenhouse gases from as far back as 100 years ago or even earlier, the theory of man-made global warming did not achieve any real political traction until the late 1970's.U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind The Global Warming ScareThe alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”I will skip ahead to the Global Green New Deal Initiative and how it’s nothing but the UN’s Agenda 21’s Sustainable Development presented in disguise.Here it is explained in detail:The Green New Deal is in fact a part of a global sustainable development program that was officially rolled out at the “Earth Summit” held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Out of that summit came Agenda 21 Earth Summit: The United Nations Program of Action from Rio, a 354-page document that can be purchased at online book retailers or downloaded in pdf format from the UN website.Agenda 21 has been updated to include Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and its offshoot the Global Green New Deal which is a program that was commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program or UNEP for short, mentioned above. A map and outline of “partners” reveals just how deeply embedded in global thinking this program has become. Effectively, Agenda 21 provides the template while Agenda 2030 gives the goals for achieving “sustainable development”.Inasmuch as Sustainable Goal 13 is about Climate Action, it is worth noting that in 2009 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) set up an unelected international climate regime with authority to dictate land use, relocate “human settlements” and directly intervene in the financial, economic, health care, education, tax and environmental affairs of all nations signing the treaty. One must wonder why upwards of $100 billion has been spent on promotion of the current global warming model yet next to no discussion is devoted to natural forcing agents such as solar and cosmic radiation, volcanoes, clouds, water vapor, and grand solar minimums – even though these have been well documented in the scientific literature to have significant impact on climate. Nor have funds been committed to disseminating information about military weather warfare or other long standing geoengineering projects and their effect on climate. Yet at least five geoengineering Solar Radiation advocates co-authored the section covering contrails in the 2007 IPCC report.As uncovered by prominent activist Rosa Koire, Sustainable Development was originally created and defined by the United Nations in 1987. President George Herbert Walker Bush, along with leaders from 178 other nations, signed the “Action Plan” unveiled at Rio in 1992.This plan is anchored by the political philosophy of Communitarianism which effectively establishes a new legal system used by regional and local governments affiliated with the emerging global government, circumventing national law via a program of “balancing.” Implemented by a relatively small self-appointed group of decision-makers and influencers who achieve “consensus” among themselves rather than through the public voting process, this philosophy holds that the individual’s rights are a threat to the global community. In practice, the consistent rallying cry “for the greater good” is defined any way that suits those in power.Within six months of his election in 1992, former President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order #12852 thus creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development or PCSD. This Council ran for six years, 1993-1999. Its members included Cabinet Secretaries for Transportation, Agriculture, Education, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, Energy, Interior, and Defense. CEO’s of various businesses, such as Enron, Pacific Gas & Electric, BP Amoco, Dow Chemical and others also were included, as were environmental organizations, including the National Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, World Resources Institute, the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund among others.To further facilitate the transition, Clinton awarded the American Planning Association a multi-million dollar grant to write a land use legislative blueprint for every municipality in the U.S. Completed in 2002, this blueprint is entitled Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook with Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change. As Koire tells us, this guidebook is being used in every university, college and government planning office in the nation. And as part of the Common Core program for the younger set, former Vice President Al Gore helped write Rescue Mission Planet Earth: A Children’s Edition of Agenda 21.In 2012 “H Concurrent Resolution 353” was discussed by the U.S. Congress. A short, 8 minute video clip shows various members, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rising in support of H CON Res 353, which “expressed the sense of the Congress that the U.S. should take a strong leadership role in implementing the decisions made at the Rio Earth Summit by developing a national strategy to install Agenda 21 and other Earth Summit agreements through domestic and foreign policy.”As Koire relates, the clear goal of these initiatives was, and is, to change public policy to bring it into alignment with the Agenda 21 plan.Implementation and ImplicationsAgenda 21 is a global plan that is to be implemented locally via “soft law”. Despite the fact that this agenda would have far reaching material impact on each and every one of us, the U.S. citizenry has not been given the opportunity to study or vote on any of the various facets of Agenda 21. Moreover, the vast majority, out of deep concern for the planet, are effectively neutralized by the jargon, buzz words and slogans with purposely obscure definitions, all of which are dreamt up by the best PR firms money can buy. Perhaps even worse, as Rosa Koire, who has experienced negative ramifications in her Santa Rosa community, writes in Behind the Green Mask:The irony is that UN Agenda 21 mandates ‘more’ citizen involvement but does it by creating so many boards, commissions, regional agencies, non-profits, meetings and programs that it is impossible to stay on top of what is happening. We’re too burned out to fight more than one issue at a time. So we become, necessarily, more fragmented, less of a neighborhood, exhausted and isolated because we can’t keep up. The so-called citizen involvement is dictated by phony neighborhood groups with paid lobbyists and facilitators running them. The boards and commissions are chosen based on ‘team players’ or shills selected to push through an end game by running over the few actual unconnected citizens. These groups are the ‘prescreening groups’ for candidates for public office. THEY are the ones who get donations at election time. It’s doubtful that anyone will get on the ballot who doesn’t play ball.There were 17 official sustainable development goals (or SDGs) for the new 2030 Agenda that was universally adopted by nations around the world at the United Nations plenary meeting in New York on September 25, 2015. These SDGs do not replace Agenda 21. The 2030 Agenda clearly states, “We reaffirm all the principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, including, inter alia, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.”A short article, titled “Agenda 2030 Translator: How to Read the UN’s New Sustainable Development Goals,” unveils some of the actual consequences of the Agenda. To start you off, Goal 1 as stated: End Poverty in all its forms everywhere. Goal 1 as translated: Centralized banks, IMF, World Bank, Fed to control all finances. Goal 2 as stated: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Goal 2 as translated: GMO. And so on.Another article titled simply Agenda 21 shows how big “S” Sustainable Development will affect the farmer:If you own livestock and they can drink from a creek, then they want you to permanently fence off your own land to prevent any upset of potential fish habitat… Agenda 21 focuses on the goal of eliminating meat consumption and using pastures to grow wheat, corn and soy for human consumption. To get us to comply, we’re told in endless propaganda campaigns that meat is dangerous and the vegan lifestyle is the only healthy alternative… “Grazing livestock” is listed as “unsustainable” in the UN’s Global Biodiversity Assessment Report. In the same document, agriculture and private property are listed as “unsustainable.” All the private property and water rights infringements we have been seeing come directly out of the Sustainable Development programs. They come in a wide variety of names to throw people off, such as Comprehensive Planning, Growth Management, Smart Growth, and so forth.The local government implementation of Agenda 21 was prepared by ICLEI(which stands for International Council for Local Environment Initiatives) for the Earth Council’s Rio+5 Forum held April 13–19, 1997 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; for the 5th Session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development; and for the UN General Assembly’s “Earth Summit+5” Special Session. Out of this came The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide put out by ICLEI and the United Nations.Resilient Cities are part of ICLEI. According to its website the organization was founded in 2010 by ICLEI (now known as Local Governments for Sustainability), the affiliated World Mayors Council on Climate Change and the similarly affiliated City of Bonn, Germany. Resilient Cities is billed as the first forum on cities and adaptation to climate change. In 2012 Resilient Cities was renamed as Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation.Smart Growth, Smart Cities and 5GSmart Growth and Smart Cities are also part of the “sustainability” plan as evidenced by their lofty sounding goals which somehow fail to look at “new” energy or even non-industrial hemp as a soil-rebuilding, environment-friendly way to provide a sizable portion of the nation’s energy needs; which fail to understand the crucial importance of restoring carbon-rich humus to the soil via holistic livestock management and other forms of regenerative agriculture; which somehow rely on the big banks and a flotilla of “investors” rather than doing the obvious by reforming the nation’s monetary system; and which, as Koire and others correctly assert, can only lead to totalitarianism in the end.The explosive, worldwide rollout of 5G networks “makes Smart Cities a reality” despite recognized and significant associated health risks. By September of 2018, thanks to an FCC ruling and carrier lobbying, twenty states, seemingly under cover of night, had already passed legislation to strip their cities of the power to regulate 5G rollouts. The FCC ruling in particular has sparked considerable push back, because not only will the FCC’s move force taxpayers to subsidize industry access to publicly owned infrastructure but, as chief information officer for New York City Samir Saini declared: “the FCC is threatening the public’s right to control public property, and dozens of cities, states, and towns from New York City to Lincoln, Nebraska to Anchorage, Alaska are ready to defend that right on behalf of our residents and taxpayers.”On top of all this we now find that the “tsunami” of data collection enabled by 5G could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025. As most know, wind and solar (both of which also have significant environmental and land use problems) just won’t cut it, and especially so with 5G.An Endless Web of Carefully Branded Commissions, Boards, Agencies and ProgramsOther groups and organizations tied to Agenda 21 continue to proliferate. These organizations include those that formulate “Climate Action Plans” now being adopted by local communities worldwide. The Center for Climate Solutions is one such organization and the California based Institute for local Government is another. You can google your state, city or county plus “Climate Action Plan and Resilient Plan” to learn more about how this is taking place in your own community. You can bet that none of them include alternative forms of “new” energy (including soil building non-industrial hemp) or regenerative (carbon-sequestering) agriculture which can only be properly practiced by small producers.An offshoot of the Regional Planning Association is America 2050 whose focus is on planning for the emergence of mega-regions, or high density urban areas, along with infrastructure development, with the aim of “shaping the infrastructure investment plan” and “providing leadership on a broad range of transportation, sustainability, and economic-development issues impacting America’s growth in the 21st century.” FEMA feeds into the development of megaregions through its Hazard Mitigation Program through which it, as well as HUD, provide grants to assist, at taxpayer expense, state and local communities with the purchase of properties located in high fire risk, high flood risk, high erosion risk, high mudslide risk areas.“Redevelopment” is another important and mis-leading buzzword, as it in truth represents an unknown government which among other things uses eminent domain for private gain, not the “greater good” despite claims to the contrary. As Koire writes in her book Behind the Green Mask:A little 40 page book titled Redevelopment: The Unknown Government put out by the California Municipal Officials for Redevelopment Reform lays out the ugly truth with charts, cartoons and hard data … Supported by powerful lobbyist groups fronting bond brokers, lawyers, and debt consultants, the trend of designating more and more redevelopment areas is also supported by government agency staff members and private businesses that profit from redevelopment. Diverting property taxes to these bloodsuckers is big business: by 2006 redevelopment agencies statewide (in California) had amassed $81 billion in bonded indebtedness, a figure that is doubling every 10 years. And don’t think that this is only in California – it’s in nearly every city and county in the United States. Because the agencies can sell bonded debt without voter approval (unlike school boards) and the city’s general fund is responsible for any over-extended debt, these are cash cows for bond brokerage firms.Other organizations tasked with promoting “sustainable development” and its corollary the “Green New Deal” include the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD, and the World Resources Institute.Food Production and Food ChoiceThe World Resource Institute recently published Creating a Sustainable Food Future which was produced “in partnership with the World Bank, UN Environment (UNEP), UN Development Programme and the French agricultural research agencies CIRAD and INRA.” On its publication announcement page, it asks whether we will be able to produce enough food sustainably to feed the estimated 10 billion people that will exist on the planet by 2015.As explained in fair detail in my book Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy the answer is a resounding yes! Contrary to Agenda 21 fears, we will be able to sustainably feed, conservatively, 20 to 30 billion people worldwide if we change the way we do agriculture, which MUST include holistically managed livestock. In so doing we will dramatically reduce the amount of land now devoted to industrial agricultural systems and the amount of pollution generated by such systems – all while putting carbon back in the soil where it is needed to sustain life on this planet.At first glance the above-mentioned World Resource report also seems to agree, as indicated by this 2018 headline in a San Francisco Chronicle articletitled “New Report Urges Drastic Changes in Food Production and Consumption”. The article goes on to summarize the report’s version of “sustainability”:The core recommendations of the 96-page report line up with many of the innovations that are already happening, sometimes at a small scale, at many Bay Area farms, food companies and tech startups. That includes the development of plant-based meat substitutes, companies and local governments that focus on reducing food waste, and farms that are making changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… The report calls on governments to fund research and development and to provide “flexible regulations” for new technology such as plant-based meat substitutes and innovations in plant breeding like genetic editing… Individuals should make changes to their diets, too, the authors say, especially in wealthy countries like the United States where the majority of animal-based foods are eaten … A lot of the technological advances the report urges are happening in the Bay Area. The region has become a global hub for the creation of plant-based meat substitutions, including those made by Impossible Foods of Redwood City… A new batch of companies is developing lab-grown or “cultured” meat that will be made of chicken, beef or fish tissue from cells but won’t require raising or killing animals.Green Grabbing, The Best Way to Save Nature Is to Sell ItThe 1992 Rio Earth Summit spawned a series of world summits on sustainable development sponsored by the UN. In 2012 the 20th anniversary of the Rio summit was dubbed Rio + 20. Its focus was the Green Economy with the specific purpose of ushering in global economic growth by putting market values on environmental services and environmentally-friendly production and consumption. This plan led to the term “green grabbing” which refers to the appropriation of land and resources – purportedly for environmental ends. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, as this article in Bloomberg Online suggests, Wall Street Is More Than Willing to Fund the Green New Deal.Some illustrative excerpts which were taken from a 2012 article titled Green Grabbing Our Future at Rio + 20, appeared in my book Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy. The article was originally posted on the Food First website, and was written by Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First. Some excerpts:The Rio process itself has been steadily privatized under the weight of 20 years of neoliberal globalization. As the global contradictions between economy and environment have intensified, nature itself is becoming a source of profit… What was once a state-oriented, regulatory framework has morphed into a market-based, corporate initiative.The corporate trend to privatize and commercialize ecosystem services and resources in the name of environmental protection is known as “green grabbing” as these schemes can result in local communities losing resource rights… It is the favored approach of the big conservation organizations like World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International (CI) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), who have thus guaranteed their place at the Rio+20 negotiating table alongside neoliberal governments and powerful multinational business interests.The Green Economy concept that determines the content of all submissions [for the Zero draft report] was itself created by a group led by Pavan Sukhdev a former senior banker from Deutsche Bank and head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative. This is a reflection of a long trend in partnering between the CBD, big environmental organizations and corporate representatives i.e. the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, the International Chamber of Commerce, CI, WWF, IUCN etc.The dubious justification for bringing nature to Wall Street—where credits and shares of ecosystem services, biodiversity derivatives, avoided emissions and even wildlife species banking can be chopped up, repackaged and resold along with debt, mortgages, hedge funds and the like—is that the best way to save nature is to sell it. In doing so, we are told, we will grow the economy and this in turn will benefit the poor, thus ending poverty and hunger.”Summing It UpIn practical terms, Agenda 21 is a global plan implemented locally through ICLEI (and other bodies and organs) using “soft law”. The following excerpts from an article titled “UN’s Agenda 21Targets Your Mayor” provide a useful example of how local implementation occurs:From June 1 through 5, 2005, the city of San Francisco was the site of an international conference called “World Environment Day.” But the agenda of this conference was much bigger than just another hippy dance in the park. This meeting of the global elite had a specific target and an agenda with teeth. The goal was the full implementation of the UN’s Agenda 21 policy called Sustainable Development, a ruling principle for top-down control of every aspect of our lives – from food, to health care, to community development, and beyond. This time, the target audience is our nation’s mayors. The UN’s new tactic, on full display at this conference, is to ignore federal and state governments and go straight to the roots of American society. Think globally – act locally.Here’s a quick look at a few of the 21 agenda actions called for. Under the topic of energy, action item number one calls for mayors to implement a policy to increase the use of “renewable” energy by 10% within seven years. Renewable energy includes solar and wind power.Not stated in the UN documents is the fact that in order to meet the goal, a community would have to reserve thousands of acres of land to set up expensive solar panels or even more land for wind mills. Consider that it takes a current 50-megawatt gas-fired generating plant about 2-5 acres of land to produce its power. Yet to create that same amount of power through the use of solar panels would require at least 1,000 acres. Using wind mills to generate 50 megawatts would require over 4,000 acres of land, while chopping up birds and creating a deafening roar. The cost of such “alternative” energy to the community would be vastly prohibitive. Yet, such unworkable ideas are the environmentally-correct orders of the day that the mayors are being urged to follow.”Rosa Koire, mentioned earlier, sums up the end game on her website Democrats Against Agenda 21:The problem that almost no one sees is that UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action plan to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, all energy, and all human beings in the world. Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is about Inventory and Control!Beware Agenda 21 and its Green New Deal!