Re: energy

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> rodhay@xxxxxxxxxx 06/28/00 05:09PM >>>
Charles It is not a matter of faith. It is a simple calculation. Amount
of energy available minus amount used by humans in the course of their
history. The result if a very large positive number. We are not going to
run out of energy.

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CB: Mark Jones and Lou Proyect seem to get a different result for the difference than you with respect to fossil fuels.

"Amount of energy used by humans in the course of their history" has been drastically, "exponentially" less up until about two hundred years ago, no ? There was no internal combustion engine until about a hundred years ago. That means for the first 200,000 years minus one hundred years there was almost no fossil fuel used compared to the last one hundred. I'm sure you are aware of exponential functions and all that. They explode.

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Alternatives to internal combustion engines are technological infants,
but they are available and will soon be economic.

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CB: Well, socialism is coming soon too, but will it be in time to avoid a major catastrophe. I mean real major.  It is not guaranteed that the logic of capital accumulation will be rational relative to developing the new energy technologies you mention.

For example, GM caused our public mass transit system in Detroit to be ripped up in the 1930's so that they could sell more cars. Unless GM and its class partners are overthrown, they may sell out the human race on the new energy technologies you mention.

Perhaps a better example in reverse, the bourgeoisie caused the development of nuclear weapons, an affirmative technological development that is the destructive equivalent of not developing the new energy technologies you mention above. This demonstrates that capitalists are capable of species-suicide or species-catastrophe short of extinction,  levels of irrationality in trying to hold on to their profiteering system. Rather than let socialism develop, the capitalists instituted a nuclear weapons race to thwart it.

There is a tendency here to ignore that capitalists have developed the mode of destruction as fantastically as they has developed the mode of production, evincing thereby a world historic level of irrationality and tendency to species-suicide/catastrophe.

Right now, the U.S. is more focused on developing Star Wars, a dangerous extention of the nuclear arms race,  than the new energy technologies you mention.

I urge a lot less faith in the inevitable rationality of the bourgeoisie.

CB