[A-List] Oil Addiction: The World in Peril - 16

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Pierre Chomat (Universal Publishers, 2004)

translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder


Part II. Age of Excess

Chapter 16. Ergamines: Slave Labor


Our ability to afford three barrels of ergamines to fly us from San Francisco to
Paris, and the ability of Gustave and his fellow farmers in Europe and the
United States to burn more than a gallon of fuel a day putting food on our
tables, is based solely on the bargain-basement prices that we pay for our
ergamines. Our scientists sometimes refer to them as energy slaves, and slaves
they truly are. When we acquire them, we pay only for the cost of their
extraction, transportation, and refining - plus a little more in profits to
their owners and developers, including some taxes for the government. But we 
by no means pay for the amount of labor that they replace.

But whether or not one is willing to consider them as slaves, calculating the
theoretical "wages" of ergamines based on the silent labor provided by their
unseen hands can be very enlightening. It is easy enough to do. If $24 is the
price of a barrel of crude oil on the international market, the cost of 1,000
ergamines comes to seventeen cents. That is how much the exporter is paid for
handing over 1,000 of his little slaves.

Once they have been transported, refined and distributed, these 1,000 ergamines
(which make up a little over a third of a gallon) sell in US gas stations for
approximately sixty cents. This is nearly four times their initial purchase
price, and all this added value has been funneled, via industry and taxes, into
the United States economy, not that of the exporting nation.

In the United States this brings the cost of one drop of oil, one ergamine, to
.06 cents (six hundredths of a cent). In Europe, where taxes are much higher,
ergamines go about for double that amount, or .12 cents. No matter what side of
the Atlantic you are on, the amounts are paltry. They cannot be considered wages.
They are less than charity. After a day of physical labor, an American or
European skilled worker would take home at least $120. The labor provided by
ergamines costs 100,000 times less than that of human beings! Habib is right:
this is more like plunder!  We pay the exporters cheap and consume their
potential labor in quantities that are beyond wasteful. And yet we sometimes
complain that gasoline is too expensive!  Where does the truth lie?

A friend once pointed out that because ergamines are incapable of exploiting
their own energy potential, calculating their cost in terms of theoretical
"wages" makes no sense. Only their overall cost, including the cost of the human
labor and materials needed to exploit them, would be meaningful, he said. He
asked me to compare the overall cost of the ergamine, figuring in the cost of
all the equipment and personnel that surround it, to the cost of labor for a
factory worker, who also requires equipment and supervisory staff to do his job.

I thought the airplane, a very expensive and technologically complicated machine
run by highly trained personnel, would be ideal for figuring the high-end cost
of an ergamine with all its human and material entourage. It was certainly one
of the best examples I could have chosen to illustrate my point. Again, the
calculation was a simple one. I chose a New York-Paris flight, at a cost of
$1,200 per ticket. For this trip, the plane usually consumes an average of two
barrels of fuel per passenger, the equivalent of 300,000 ergamines. The price of
one ticket covers not only the actual cost of the ergamines,  but all of the
other expenses generated by the flight: depreciation of the airplane,
maintenance equipment, airport taxes, the wages of ground and flight personnel,
travel agency fees, and other surcharges added in along the way. Therefore, by
dividing the price of the ticket by the number of ergamines consumed per
passenger, I obtained the actual cost of an ergamine at work. Dividing $1,200 by
300,000 gave me a cost of .4 cents (four tenths of a penny) for one ergamine
consumed on such a flight. In comparison, the cost of a day's labor by a factory
worker calculated in the same fashion is on the order of $400. This means the
price we pay each of the ergamines that fly us from one continent to another is
again 100,000 times less than what we pay for an equivalent amount of human
labor. Perhaps we should appreciate our flights more than we do.

There is no doubt: the price we pay for our ergamines does not correspond to the
value of the labor that they perform.

During all the years I spent in the petroleum industry traveling to nearly every
corner of the globe, I have never come across a single colleague who has made
this connection. If we want to be honest with ourselves, and especially with the
generations that will follow us, we must admit that our exploitation of this
easy energy is positively shameless. We pay so little for it, we consume it as
if there were no end to it and no tomorrow. We use it to satisfy our every whim,
without realizing that the energy we are frivolously wasting is in fact lost
potential labor. What is worse, we give no thought to how we are depleting the
Earth's reserves. We use ergamines to make our powerful cars run, sometimes just
to go cruising around. We use them to transport apples from New Zealand and
bottles of Perrier from France to countries all over the world. We use them to
flatten our hills so we can build new cities. We use them to fly hordes of
sleeping tourists through the clouds, to build tunnels out to islands, to
construct roads and then light them at night, to carry sightseers and their
cameras to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, and to
send soldiets to capture oil fields.

An herbivore is content to eat the plants that he needs. A carnivore does not
kill a gazelle every five minutes for pleasure or to turn a profit. But we human
beings are different!  We know the lure of gain. We are not content to satisfy
our actual needs. We do not hesitate to exhaust all of our resources!
"Always-more" is our motto, our mode of evolution!  No doubt it, we have become
"energivores!"

The ergamines have become our slaves. They exist mainly to move our egosystems
forward. Our objectives are money, money, and more money. And we want it right
now!

Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/