The numbers on American consumption is staggering. Compared to the rest of the world, the average U.S. clone consumes 16 times more crap in one day than their fellow humans from all other nations.
That’s garbage alone. You claim to need something you don’t, you buy it, you throw it away. Because of your superior evolution, processed food, television and the Gap are essential to survival.
Fortunately, it is possible to stop eating, watching and wearing over-processed, over-rated and over-priced prole-control constructs. Energy consumption, however, is an area where options are limited.
Artificially limited, that is, by Big Oil and Old Nuke. The limitations are institutionalized by the short-sighted and irresponsible energy policies of the Reagan/Bush Administrations (81-92) and the Republican Congress since 1994.
They know who pays their bills and they know you don’t vote.
The world’s oil supply stands currently at about 40 to 50 years. In a pure neoliberal, capitalist market, oil can theoretically last forever. As supply goes down, assuming demand is relatively constant, the price will rise to adjust to lower supplies.
Staying right with neoliberal, capitalist economics, a point should come in the supply curve where demand cannot be controlled without sending prices into the ozone. Because these future moments are easily predicted, a reasonable government with reasonable people giving their consent to be governed, would create policies for alternative, efficient and–while we’re looking–cleaner sources of energy.
The reality is that the–for lack of a more precise term–bourgeois wants neoliberal economics for everyone else and impossible Marxist price controls for themselves. Our energy economics don’t work if the elite can’t cheat on their passion for the ideas of Adam Smith.
Click between various news sites. Oil is between $30 to $35 per barrel. Since the U.S. subjugated Iraq in 1991, no oil producing nation would dare to upset the psychotic conservative establishment in Washington D.C.
It doesn’t matter what supply and demand says. The U.S. will shove a gun in your face if the corporate clone machine stops ticking. You say nothing about it because you were likely not educated to any other way that government can serve its people. The result is that you pay your share of the $30 barrel of oil but the U.S. pays approximately $70 to $80 per barrel to make sure that the system doesn’t break down.
Basically, the financial reports of news programs lie every day. Because the supply curve is distorted, running out of oil is inevitable.
Not that U.S. society really wants to be dependent on oil, it’s just that the system wasn’t designed with any other energy in mind.
If you pay attention to the terminology of our current Administration, they are strongly against foreign sources of oil. Not against oil itself. They offer no alternative to the alleged doom that results from foreign sources of oil except to move forward with drilling into our own land. Sensitive lands. Areas where previous presidents had the same choice and declined the same choice.
The Bush Administration could offer to force auto makers to produce cars that are 5 miles per gallon more efficient than previous years. In a fleet of 160 million cars, that’s over 8 million gallons of oil that we don’t burn per mile . But it won’t happen so long as you keep driving your POS SUV, don’t care, don’t know, don’t vote and don’t act like a responsible human who wants to see their genes make it to eternity.
Clearly, you cannot throw your car away. Just think smarter next time you buy a vehicle.
Automobiles aren’t necessarily the biggest evil in oil consumption. Power companies would rank among the worst environmental offenders on the planet.
A power company runs on either coal, oil or uranium. All of the high quality, cleaner burning coal in this country was used up a long, long time ago. All current sources of coal are political disasters waiting to happen. They are left alone for the easily understood fact that nobody wants to live in Dickens’ Industrial London.
Next is oil. The fact that American solar companies that pioneered research and development in the ’70s had their money cut to crumbs by Reagan is a blemish on the government in yet another failure to do the right things against doing anti-competitive, anti-capitalist political favors for the oil industry.
There is no reason in the world why the United States shouldn’t have a massive, profitable and productive solar industry. External energy consumption on homes should be next to nothing because every home in this nation should be running off the sunshine and storing that power in batteries for rainy days.
Power companies would go broke if you used them only during the winter months. Throughout the southern United States, power companies shouldn’t even exist. In a pure neoliberal, capitalist energy market, information and venture capital would allow alternative energy such as solar home systems to become independent of the power grid.
Australia has already implemented such a system.
The political reality in the U.S. is that we have city governments. We have city governments. We have local governments. All of these levels have the same defective mutation in their genetic code–they are run by politicians that are beholden to inefficient corporations which force the rest of the population to adopt inefficient behavior.
The nuclear power problem needs very little explanation. There is nowhere to put nuclear waste. Plants are running far beyond their designed years. Europe works to get rid of them. We keep them.
The common thread through all of these thoughts is that energy consumption is not an ideological issue yet the actions of very few people endanger everyone else. Not worrying about your own consumption is a choice. Not worrying about the structure of energy use in your community is also a choice.
The biggest vote you have is a dollar. The issue is straight economics but the true shades deceive the average clone through ignorance and disinformation. The elite want Marxism’s controlled prices and guaranteed inventories so they can exact capitalism on everybody else.
If everyone played by the same rules of economic liberalism set forth by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations , capitalism wouldn’t be treated like a four letter word. It’s interesting how inequality breeds discontent.
