Is it, though?
The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now?
Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet. And what is needed to grow all that corn, soy, and alfafa feed? The tapped-out Colorado or the dwindling Ogallala...
I'm sure there are a couple of pure IP-value plays out there, but look deep enough and most everything is tied back to food, fuel, or the finite ability of the ecosystem to maintain infinitely-exponential growth.
Calories per hectare is one way of measuring food systems, and a great way when we assume fuel inputs are infinite, inexhaustible, and cheap. Calories per unit of inputs is another way.
Hybridization of crop plants increased the calories per hectare per year produced. Again, I don't know if the plants were actually producing more edible nutrients per pound of fertilizer.
Doesn't Ozempic make people eat less? If anything it's disproving your point. It's providing value, but at the same reducing the amount of "food and fuel" consumed.
This has been done for a while and mostly doesn't work.
Also, it's very hard to make something work which huge monied interests design products in a manner to ensure you fail. Are you just going to ask your grocery store to stop putting salt-fat-sugar in bright packages right by the checkout, packages and foods that are being developed by well paid groups to get you to consume as much as possible.
It's also very hard when your body is designed to do one thing. Consume as many calories as possible so you don't starve to death, because your genes are screaming at you "Starvation is coming, it always does".
So the only 'cool' statement is yours by completely not understanding the situation at all.
America was on-average wealthier than most of the world and an early adopter of highly palatable convenience foods, so its obesity problem came on earlier. Global obesity rates are rising as more people globally can afford microwave ovens, frozen pizzas, drive-through restaurants serving french fries, and other such aids for high speed ingestion of delicious, calorie-dense foods.
Most people who need to lose weight cannot willfully maintain diet alterations in the long term. They go back to old habits. For 99.9% of human existence starvation was a much more common health threat than obesity and we're just not "wired" to experience excess food intake as a threat. The GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide reduce the desire to overeat, regardless of how palatable the food is, so people who could not lose weight before are able to eat less without having to consciously suppress desire every day.
Man, i wish Americans were just eating the corn with salt. Would be a lot healthier than corn starch+syrup whatever.
~75% of US corn goes to fuel and animal feed.
No this isn’t accurate. No one values IP for its own sake; it is still responsible for generating revenue and being translated into profit. The process by which this happens is still resource extraction (raw materials into chips, energy into processors, etc etc etc).
And you are really only talking about tech. Every other industry has the same demand for infinite growth and can’t hide behind an IP abstraction layer.
The real problem I see is when people use wealth generated from intangibles to put the squeeze on physical resources, such as buying up land as an investment to drive up the price when people need a place to live.