… do not calle up That which you can not put downe
- H.P. Lovecraft
I saw a piece on CNN today about the booming car culture in China, and the possible ramifications this will have on the oil sector. What I couldn’t help but remember was a time when American auto companies were falling all over each other to sell China on automobiles. Representatives of our auto industry engineered new and inventive ways to convince the Chinese that they couldn’t do without a car. The Chinese car culture, then, would seem to be something of our creation, rather than China’s – all two hundred fifty million -plus potential auto purchasers in middle class China, for which the car is now a status symbol. That’s two hundred fifty million or more times the oil consumption, and two hundred fifty million or more times the pollution. But this was seen as a real boon for the American economy at the time, as a means of bolstering the American auto sector; and so our people went to China and pushed for a car craze.
We all now have seen that the biofuel idea may not have been our best solution to Middle East oil dependency. I know there are still proponents who say that the programs haven’t been given enough time and funding; but I would have a hard time asking someone who’s already starving to give me more time for developing a good second generation biofuel source.
While talking about oil, I’m of course reminded of George W. Bush – Gawd’s solution to Osama Bin Laden (America’s former solution to the USSR in Afghanistan), and to the wickedness of gun-hatin’ gawdless homo-rights-supportin’ Democrats. Well, either Gawd has a perverse sense of humor, or someone misrepresented himself and his agenda.
I’m starting to think that what the world needs least right now is another batch of our solutions. Like our quote from Lovecraft illustrates, we’ve created solutions that we can’t easily change or dispatch – we’ve set loose monsters of our own creation, and in all likelihood will just wind up creating even more monsters to dispatch the current ones.
