Fossil Fuels

So why are we using them?

I must have been young since I was still kicking my little brother around, when I saw an ad in a kid’s catalog. It was for a hydroplane machine that would convert any household vacuum cleaner into a little hydrofoil (the actual name at the time) that you could ride around your house on. Of course, it could only hold a small amount of weight, and good luck using it for two weeks before it fell apart and your parent got mad at you for destroying their vacuum cleaner. However, there was something interesting about the idea.

Why had something so simple, that could be had for what must have been about five dollars in the 1980’s, allow me to just hover around my own house? Sure, I was just six or seven, but maybe sixty or seventy pounds, and I loved it. The joy was there. The fun was there. The UTILITY…the RESOURCE…I needed from it was there. I was moving from one place to another. It lasted for two weeks, and sure it busted the vacuum cleaner quickly, but who cared, that was not the point. The point was that I was having fun and the company that shipped me the four or five little parts and instructions was probably making big margins. That was my first lesson in big oil.

In the 2000’s there was this thing called the ethanol race. Companies around the world were fighting to turn all these different kinds of biofuels into something better than gasoline. They thought they could charge more, while convincing the global public that it was safer for the environment. However, there were two huge challenges. One, almost every single biofuel was destroying an important food source like corn or an algae that more advanced species lived off, which WE in turn lived off of. Two, electric cars were suddenly in the mix. So, we had this massive competition happening, all while the finance companies of the world were trying to invest in it properly, aka guess. No one knew which was better. Gas had been used for so long, it was a complete toss up!

So, the big banks of the world started getting desperate. They decided to take riskier and riskier bets in order to invest in the energy source guessing game that they thought would replace oil for all the cars people were going to use, plus suddenly you also had technology improvements making this competition faster. There had been competitive resource races before, but not with the Internet suddenly making most developed nations around the world either in the race or trying to GET into it. The fun was just starting.

Well, rather than rehash what has happened over the last ten years, I am going to point out the illusions of the entire situation. First, ethanol and water and steam and wood were able to power every car on Earth over 100 years ago. The only reason it was decided oil was the trick was that there were just more participants. More countries could be a part of the shell game. Oil could be found all over the place. You could get it in Australia, Russia, the USA, Saudi Arabia, Iran…Brazil…fucking everywhere. So, the leaders of the biggest countries on Earth, which would later become the United Nations and OPEC and all those fun big gun toting behemoths, decided oil would be the key to the shell game. They would form a network between themselves that would keep the smaller guys at bay. It was not that there were not better options many years ago, even almost 200 years ago when guys like Tesla and Edison were making GOOD electric cars…but this time around, the big guys could just beat up the smaller guys harder and faster and keep the pummeling, through the pumping, going on and on…and on.