I hope my title adequately conveys the absurdity of our current vigor plans. Even though every president since Richard Nixon has called for vigor independence, we are farther from it today than we were then--and we remain doomed to continue failing as long as our vigor hereafter is shaped by vigor corporations or by politicians.
We citizens must be the leaders on this issue. Oil corporations and politicians are the butterfly nets in my minuscule analogy-the wrong tools for the wrong job.
Oil fellowships can't do the job because they are multinational corporations. By law, their only loyalty can be to their multinational investors. If they are swayed by patriotism, by environmental concerns, or even by the phenomenal social good, they can be sued by their shareholders. Shareholders might think a unavoidable estimate spent on Pr to be a good investment, but not if it's backed up with real performance that cuts into the bottom line.
Politicians can't be trusted to help us achieve vigor independence because corporate campaign contributions, especially from big oil, are the lifeblood of Washington politics.
Any plan for vigor independence that does not include corporate restructuring and political campaign finance reform is as imaginary as a unicorn. The pampered pet unicorn currently favored by big oil and politicians looks like this: Instead of spending billions of dollars on oil from the Middle East, we need to drill, baby, drill. We need to drill right down to the last drop of Us oil, even if it's in ecologically sensitive areas or in areas hazardous to reach. No risk is too greatest to break our dependence on foreign oil.
What most of us don't know is that oil drilled in Alaska or in the Gulf of Mexico no more belongs to us, the American people, than the oil drilled in Saudi Arabia. Oil drilled here gets sold to the top bidder on the international market just like oil from in any place else. It can go to China or India just as no ifs ands or buts as it can go to Indiana. The only advantage to Us taxpayers for oil drilled here is that we get to keep fractions of a penny on the dollar for oil lease fees and royalties.
As we've learned from the big Gulf oil disaster, oil that we have been duped into believing is ours isn't even all the time being drilled by Us-based multinationals. Not one of these corporations, foreign or domestic, cares a whit about helping the Us achieve vigor independence. They naturally want to help themselves to maximum profits and will use any excuse to get us to rubberstamp their greed.
Their myths of new drilling, clean coal, and green nuclear power each deserve and will finally get their own articles, but in this one, I'm going to focus on the myths of solar and wind power because even supposedly green technologies won't be green when vigor corporations get through with them.
Energy corporations work on a model of producing electricity as cheaply as possible, sending it out through the power grid, and charging us as much as potential when it's delivered to us. Solar or wind power is just an afterthought to them, but to the extent that they have a plan for it at all, it follows the same model.
Here's the problem--any vigor hereafter that depends primarily on the existing power grid is not vigor independence. The grid cannot even assure us of trustworthy delivery much less independence. A terrorist bombing of a key power plant or a successful cyber assault on the computers that control the power grid could leave the whole country without power for months.
Although that scenario would devastate the country, vigor corporations aren't responsible for preventing it. Remember that Ceos have a legal responsibility only to their investors, and vigor execs don't think it cost-effective to make the huge investment needed to reasonably procure the grid.
My power was out for a week after Florida's hurricane Charlie. During that time, not only was I faced with spoiled food and other inconveniences at home, but I had to voyage important distances to find shop open. shop colse to were finished because they didn't have electricity to run their cash registers, refrigerate their perishables or pump their gas. Living without air conditioning through a week of steaming heat was miserable but not deadly as it would be for many trying to survive a week of frozen temperatures up North. Thank goodness I didn't need a hospital During my outage, but if I had, I could have found one colse to operating on urgency power.
Where would those of us needing food, gas or curative care go During a month long blackout affecting the whole country? No store would be open and even urgency generators would run out of fuel.
Again, none of that is our vigor companies' concern. As long as estimates of the income loss from an outage don't exceed the estimated cost of addition grid security, they are legally constrained from manufacture the investment.
A real vigor independence plan needs to decentralize power generation and make individual homes and businesses as vigor self-sufficient as possible. The power grid has a place, but top priority needs to be securing our basic vigor needs without having to depend on the grid.
Our most patriotic catchword must become: A solar power plant on every roof, a wind turbine in every backyard.
We need to insist that our legislators pass a law that all new residential and enterprise construction has at least sufficient on-site solar or wind quality to meet urgency needs.
To get existing structure to go green, and get all structure to go greener than minimums, we need to pass a new federal vigor tax on power received from the grid. The tax would start out low and grow significantly each year. income from the tax could then be used for grants and low interest loans to help citizen get their green technology in place before their rates increased.
Things would turn fast if we could directly collate the rising cost of buying electricity from the grid with the kind cash payouts we would get for selling back our excess electricity. Each month when we got whether an vigor bill or an vigor check, it would be quite an incentive both to conserve and to add to the ration of vigor that we could generate for ourselves.
Shills for big oil and big coal like to pooh-pooh solar and wind, but existing green technology is already much best than they will admit. Once we can count on a trustworthy market for alternative technology, investment will explode causing quality to skyrocket and costs to plummet.
Imagine if abacus makers had been a dominant monopoly that ridiculed the huge early computers and were successful in blocking investment in the field? You no ifs ands or buts wouldn't own a desktop computer today, and the invention of the semiconductor might still be decades away. Do we no ifs ands or buts want the likes of entrenched abacus manufacturers controlling our vigor future?
We have to expect vigor corporations to flood us with propaganda about what a bad idea solar and wind are. But since our base welfare has never been a concern of theirs, I don't see why helping them sound huge monopolistic profits needs to be a concern of ours. Why should we let them try to define leisure as their right to continue to make a killing when we're the ones getting killed?
We need to stop allowing federal lawmakers and their big oil buddies to strut across the political stage pretending to serve our needs when all they are doing is trying to convince us that their gorgeous but imaginary unicorns are within reach. We need to insist on a plan that moves immediately toward real, achievable vigor independence-independence not just for the Us as a whole, but for ourselves as individuals.
vigor Independence - Our Quest to Capture Unicorns With Butterfly Nets