If you made billions each year from people buying your product what incentive do you have to allow anyone to provide a viable alternative to your product before you have depleted your current stockpile ?
Here are some reader opinions:
With the new breakthroughs in renewable energy and the current “Energy Crisis” you would think that the world super powers would be pushing us more in to renewable energy instead of simply hiking the price of the current resource because of “Green Issues”.
I personally think that they already have a “Plan B” for the oil running dry but they wont do anything about it until they milk every last penny out of the current dirty resources which are easily taxed and regulated.
The US government, for example, recently decided to put all solar projects on hold for around two years while they “Had a think about it” but there was such an outcry they were forced to do a u-turn. Why would anyone spend two years having a ponder over an alternative as sustainable as the sun when the oil supplies are as critically low as the elites claim they are ?
Do you think that the people who rule the world and line their pockets with our hard earned cash will allow their cash cows (oil, gas, coal) to be replaced with something that they can’t levy a simple tax on until they have no option ?
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@ “Mark in Time”
The elite are rich because they keep the people poor and that’s an indisputable fact.
The divide between the two can never be closed as the more the poor people become rich the poorer rich people become.
Your quote is an interesting one but I think I read it differently to you.
Money is neither good nor evil, it is food for our greed and that food is given to us by those who will never go hungry, they give us just enough to stop our bellies from rumbling.
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@ “yankee_sailor”
” the US government put a hold on solar projects? ”
Yes, they did :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/27/easolar127.xml
And they had to change their mind :
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/04/us-puts-the-freeze-on-solar-energy-projects/
Before you say there’s no conspiracy perhaps you should bring yourself up to speed on things that actually make it in to the media.
Big Oil (like the Big Three) are sitting on a vast warehouse of alternative fuels and alternative engines, but what they’ve been lacking is the impetus to dust these things off and put them to use. But that impetus has finally arrived in three distinct forms; three extremely (for them) terrifying forms: high oil prices per barrel; Peak Oil from the Arabian oil fields; Green consciousness.
High oil price per barrel is not something that is going to go away any time soon. The causes are myriad, but one of the factors is the sense of crisis in the Middle East. The Iraqi-American war is tertiary to that; what is really causing panic in the Arabian oil fields is the knowledge that the fields have reached Peak Performance.
Peak Oil refers to the theory that all oil fields will move in a course which roughly describes a hill–it goes up, reaches the plateau (or peak) and then descends. This concept was originally postulated by a Geologist named M. King Hubbert. He said that Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. He predicted that the USA would reach peak production and begin decline in 1970. He was right. Peak Oil production in the Arabian oil fields has apparently been reached, and now begins their decline as well.
But it is Green consciousness which really worries the oil and car people. Once upon a time, the concerns about the environment were tossed aside as the bleatings of “Ecology Nuts”, but in the light of Global Warming and rising greenhouse gases (and skyrocketing oil prices) the idea of a car that gets 50-60 miles a gallon are very tempting. Already, old SUV’s are being called ‘dinosaurs’, and new ones are gathering dust in showrooms all over the world.
You ask, “Do you think that the people who rule the world and line their pockets with our hard earned cash will allow their cash cows (oil, gas, coal) to be replaced with something that they can’t levy a simple tax on until they have no option ?”
Actually that’s the least of their worries. Sheer survival is taking precedence over simple greed.
For the Saudis, for example, they must now put away their toys and deal with the fact that for seventy years they have built their entire culture based on oil, a finite resource. They have bought jets, built palaces, taken long and expensive vacations, but they have virtually no infrastructure! They cannot feed their own people with their land, which is still desert. Virtually all necessities are imported. They have made investments, yes, but nothing which will prop up their country once the oil is depleted! This is one of the factors which is driving oil prices up: they have to make up for lost time and build these things now.
For the Big Three, time is also a precious commodity. As little as three years ago, there was a board meeting at cheap prosolution pills GM in which one member put forth the idea of bringing back the Volt, GM’s electric car. His suggestion was shouted down, and the decision was made to concentrate on SUV’s instead. Now, GM is working overtime to bring back the Volt, and literally spending one billion dollars a month (!) to incorporate hybrid technology into their current manufacturing centers in order to stay alive. If GM (and other US manufacturers) wish to survive, they need to adapt.
Sixty-five million years ago, a comet slammed into the Yucatan peninsula and brought about a worldwide climate change. Within a few short years the entire world was changed, and the lumbering dinosaurs which had ruled for so long died out. In a like fashion, the current climate change and the disappearance of the dinosaur remains (fossil fuels) are necessitating another change in the evolution of transport and the way humans behave. Those who adapt will go on; those who refuse to change will perish. Such is the way of the world.
Perhaps evolution is the biggest conspiracy of all.