The rest is advertisement – advertisement for garbage. The medium of television could make our lives better but it doesn’t. I don’t care if you do it in an air-conditioned Lexus SUV. Three hours round-trip commuting in Atlanta traffic sucks. None of the stuff I listed makes our lives any better. The energy we have now is used for destructive, wasteful, and/or unnecessary purposes. People going out to buy tons of crap they don’t need, because commercials have made them feel inferior. And it’s a double wammy since what’s on TV is advertisements that cajole people to go out (in their car) and shop, shop, shop. In the average American home, the TV is on almost eight hours per day. Fewer people would be hurt and killed and there would be less incentive for terrorism.Īnd we use a lot of electricity. If we just stopped fighting so much we wouldn’t need so much energy. The military is fighting in Iraq and elsewhere to get more energy (such as oil). To address the first question, I’ll offer a few examples.įor one, a ton of energy goes into the military. and, “Do we really need to do those things?”.“What are we doing with all the energy we have now?”.This UC-BP collaboration is just the latest and most ostentatious denial and refusal to address the only two rational questions regarding the so-called energy crisis: The fundamental tenets of the faith of modern economics aren’t being questioned. What this is really meant to do is allow us to continue conducting business-as-usual. They will be able to (finally) apply technology to solve the problems created by technology. So we’re supposed to get excited that BP and UC are going to spend a lot of money (mostly public subsidies) on high-tech research and development to discover or invent technologies to solve the environmental and economic problems. If you watch the news and play a game of “opposite day,” like we did in third grade, then you’ll have a better idea of the truth. This is a good test for my rule of thumb about reality: whatever they’re saying on the TV news – on Fox, on CNN, – is probably just about the opposite. The way politicians, the media, corporations, economists, make it sound you’d think we don’t have enough now, and that we’re heading for greater demand because of population growth and economic expansion. The real energy crisis is that we have too much energy. This is perhaps the biggest collaboration between the corporate sector and academia in history, all in the name of developing alternative fuels to handle the growing energy shortage. BP plans to spend $500-million over a decade. BP PLC, the green-minded oil producer, in February chose the University of California at Berkeley to help lead low carbon research, starting with biofuels.
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