>I don't think the obstacle is technology. The products in our world are >profit driven. >Engineers don't decide what we will have. They may tell costs versus >products but the path taken is decided by others. >The current implementation of electricity is testament to that. > >What will speak louder than anything is if customers escape the monopoly. If >you can persuade others to incorporate renewable energy, to use more >efficient methods -- that speaks the only language corporate hears -- $$$. > >Kirk
Well, I sort of agree and sort of disagree. I think this is central to everything I've tried to follow for the last decade or so with respect to the alt-energy industry and alt-fuel efforts: If only the competitive profit-driven markets were working properly and well. I think one could make the claim that they've been functioning, if in a somewhat broken manner, with respect to the intertwined car-fuel industries, if one is thinking in a somewhat illegitimate sense: if it's true than in a capitalistic system with ebbs and flows and cycles to different business propositions, sometimes a very successful technology and business paradigm (e.g. cars and petrole) will become so powerful that it is able to influence ongoing national and even worldwide public perception and governmental policy to the point where the public and the government perceive, incorrectly, that free competition is taking place, that property rights are being protected, that the profit motive is still in place and able to function. That said, in some twisted sense, yes, I agree, the auto and oil companies are arguably acting out of profit motive. If an auto company perceives that it is 3rd (or whatever) worldwide in the pecking order, and in collusion with the others it perceives a massive worldwide period of technological free-for-all could leave it 50th, and if it perceives that its costs of stranded assets will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, then I guess you could make the argument that this is a reason for all the dishonesty, the failure to really try to make and sell a new technology (while keeping up a grand pretext of trying to do so), etc. Just a hypothesis. So, in that sense, there is the profit motive, though twisted. They'll say the profit motive is working in the sense that they've tried and failed to be able to sell an alt-fuel vehicle because of lack of demand or lack of fuel availability or lack of affordability yet of the technology, but these particular profit-motive claims are often outright lies. Does this invalidate looking for the profit motive? No. It just means that it's a bit more of a twisted path than we'd like to have to take to understand what they're doing. Meanwhile the profit-motive itself gets a bad name, in a way, because folks perceive there is something awry with the reasoning they're hearing, while they're being told that their demand does not exist and that they aren't interested in the cars they're interested in... But what's wrong with a company seeking to make a profit? Nothing, inherently, that I'm aware. I wish, though, that they'd perceive the way to do this is to build products that folks want to buy mid-term, and that they can afford to build and that will give them a future place in the industry, rather than just making the cars people want 2 seconds from now but not 2 years from now, while lying to those few in the nascient movements to demand different cars. As for the fuel industry, they're so dominant they can help keep down the potential competition, the electric utilities and, to some extent, nascient efforts to synthesize fuels such as from bioproducts using such mechanisms and excuses as tax laws. Well, just some ideas. I don't know if I believe everything I've written, but I don't want to spend all day on this and it's a hard topic. MM Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
