Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> That, too, has to be turned into an occasion to point it out as a
> necessary comeuppance of the decades of under-investment in
> infrastructure under neoliberalism through privatization &
> deregulation.
There was no under-investment in basic industries in the USSR, on the
contrary there was unproductive OVER-investment.
There is an issue here, btw, about not only the ROI but the EROIE (energy
return on energy invested). Briefly, if the amount of embodied-energy
expended on drilling an oil or gas well starts to near the amount of energy
extracted from the well, then even if the investment shows a profit, there
is no new net energy available to the conomy as a whole. Since most embodied
energy derives from cheap existing sources of supply, eg Saudi, it is quite
possible for this paradoxical but dangerous situation to occur, and some
analysts think that it is now occurring in the US natural gas industry. It
certainly did in the USSR, where oil production feel by almost half between
1985-1991.
Mark Jones
