Anyone spot the new Chevron commercials? They’re pretty much about 25 seconds of promoting the alternative energy research they’re pursuing , then the last 5 seconds they display the Chevron trademark and quickly flash through many energy alternatives. Solar… Hydro… Geothermal… Fast enough where you gotta be quick to read them. It finishes and holds at “Human Energy.” Of course they’re trying to give their company a warm, happy, humanitarian aspect. I wonder how many people realize though that when all the alternatives fail, how quickly our society would be willing to try to fall back on slave energy.
Man, I just watched the film “Who Killed the Electric Car?” in a macroeconomics class. The other students were suprised and outraged at how the GM-built EV1 was crushed by goverment, Big oil, and GM itself, all in the interests of profit. “How could this happen?”, my fellow students wondered. I was not surprised at all by the outcome. All I could think about was how ridiculously unsustainable capitalism is, and how no one in the class (including the teacher) could look that deeply into the problem. The electric car could not be produced because it wasn’t a moneymaker, plain and simple. Mechanics, parts companies, oil companies and car manufacturers all would be cut down in profits and jobs if the car became popular. The only people making more money would be electric companies and battery producers.
So why would we expect GM and the others to have acted in any other way? Their jobs are to make money, not to save the world. Making large amounts of money and saving the world are almost completely incompatible. If you created something that almost completely and sustainably met the needs of all parties involved, then eventually you would have no way of making profit from it. There wouldn’t be enough scarcity for people to have to work against, or for you to exploit. No extra “human energy” (or any other energy) input than the bare neccessity would be required to keep the sytem running. It would be a one-shot deal, and then everybody would be “set” for life. Well, I’d say that “god-given” need-meeting system is exactly what we had before civilization. And it’s being taken away from us more and more every day, so let’s get it back.