If you read one of my earlier blog posts in which the spending of the country are put in perspective by oreos, then you may recall that the amount of money we invest into alternative energy is beyond pathetic... it's downright laughable.
Ever since I was a small boy, I remembered hearing stories about various new promising advents in alternative energy. These stories would be featured on the nightly news, and maybe people would talk about them here and there for a few days, but they would inevitably disappear just as quickly as they came. I always used to ask myself questions, wondering whatever happened to such and such technology, and most people wouldn't even know what I was talking about.
When I got older, I learned the answer.
I remember having a very heated conversation about this topic in a seminar class as a graduate student. Me, being the natural resource economist, pointed out that we would never have free, readily accessible energy in this culture. Of course, this upset many of my liberal idealist peers, who still had faith that Obama was actually going to work towards that endeavor (it amazes me how intelligent, educated liberals can be so fucking stupid). My rational was simply this (which is as close to a paraphrase quote as I can get considering it was about 2 years ago).
If you the people the capacity to produce their own energy, you loose the ability to profit off of them, and, in turn, you loose your control over them. Creating clean, efficient, free energy is the -last- thing that the current energy tycoons want, and they'll spend billions, if not trillions, of dollars to make sure that it -never- happens.
This is a snippet of a documentary that I found awhile back that touches on this topic. It's got some good examples, and if nothing else, should be a pretty interesting watch for those of you who have a train-wreck fascination with corruption like I do.
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