>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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.
_________
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.
__________
Alternatives to internal combustion engines are technological infants,
but they are available and will soon be economic.
________
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
