>>CB: If feudalism had not been overthrown, I doubt that we would be
worried about
>>running out of fossil fuels or global warming today.
>
>Maybe we would not be worrying about it yet. It's not capitalism as such
but the
>consumption of fossil fuels that create those problems.
Are you seriously claiming that the level of fossil fuel consumption we
presently have could have ever developed on this scale outside of... apart
from... in spite of... an historically specific mode of production? It
occurs to me that this kind of hairsplitting is a very flimsy attempt to
get the capitalist mode of production off the hook... the one consistent
theme we hear from you. You can't separate the problem from its context,
now or in the past. We are all acknowledging that the physical problem
associated specifically with the use of fossil fuels can be described
apolitically as a physical phenomenon. I think we are all acknowledging
that it's a very serious problem. But to continually try to tease out an
escape for the capitalist system is either dishonest, disingenuous, or denial.
The rate of sustainable
>consumption of fossil fuel is very low and can easily be exceeded by a
european
>feudal economy or any other pre-capitalist one.
Then why wasn't it? Why didn't those feudal barons have tenant-tended deep
drilling equipment factories on each of their feifdoms?
All it takes is some technical
>innovations and the availability of these fuels.
Then why doesn't someone just do it? This is so simple, I can't believe it
isn't a decree. This is not a facetious question, but a point. The reason
no one does it is because Shell and Oxy and BP and their minions in various
governments damn well don't want to, and neither you nor I have to power to
stop them right now.
Sometimes, I swear, things can get very unreal hereabouts.
"...all truly great scientific abstractions are both universal and simple.
They are simple not because they explain so little but because they explain
so much. Generality does not arise because an abstraction represents
everything that could possibly happen, but because it remains valid no
matter what happens."
Alan Freeman
"Yes, most journalists today are worthless scum who write solely because
they can't get government subsidies paying them to drink themselves to
death (sadly, most journalism majors started down that dark path because
they were too inept for medicine, too inarticulate for law, and too
arrogant and lazy for food service, he said with self-loathing)."
Paul T. Riddell
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