I was thinking about this while lying under my
motorcycle doing the 6000 miles service.
Being green around the year 2000 meant driving a tiny hybrid Honda Insight with a “Save the whales” bumper sticker plastered between those funky rear fender skirts. These lone conservers were few and far between navigating a sea of SUV’s, consuming 5 times the fuel, labeling them liberals.
I have never understood the label liberal because it’s often applied to one who chooses to conserve resources (or reduces profit?); which would be conserve-ative..? It’s one of those strange spins of economic-politics, like having a trade embargo with Communist Cuba for 40 years when Communist China has become our dominant trade partner and labor force.
The innovative minds of yesterday that invented (and capitalized on) modern convenience, today capitalize on those inventions and innovate new layers of surcharge and ownership, adding layers upon layers of costs to consumers.
Green today means more about marketing than solution. Under the complicated layers of production of products and energy delivery, consumers have realized that they need to take steps to simplify and extract value out of everything that empowers their existence, but are left with more green static than tools to fix problems.
Capitalism is this wonderful/horrible thing where opportunity seems unlimited yet the long-term prognosis screams metastasized cancer without a moral thread sewing the futures of consumers together.
CEOs have replaced feudal lords. It’s questionable which leader has a greater motivation to support their underclass.
I ran across this interesting, ranting article from a South Africa paper, How hybrid cars cause hunger thetimes.co.za The hybrid part doesn’t make sense, but the historical perspective is fascinating.
The author relates modern agribusiness selling food stock to the highest bidder (corn for ethanol) to the emergence of apartheid where black people were forcibly removed from fertile farming land, relocated to unproductive land and forced to work on big commercial farms as underpaid laborers..
Patel points out that in the 2000 years before the British arrived in India, famines occurred once every 120 years. After the British imposed the market on India’s agricultural production, famines occurred every four years.
Despite the shortcomings of feudalism prior to the arrival of the British, India’s landowners fed peasants when harvests were bad. For millennia, a moral economy prevailed, which ensured that nobody starved.
Patel’s example shows clearly that markets lack morality. Markets follow money and nothing else. In the 1800s markets created famine in the Third World because grain was being diverted to workers in the industrialising world. Today, markets are creating famine because grain is being diverted to livestock and biofuels.
The current reality is nothing new. The difference is that the micro environments of feudal land owners that evolved into colonization and agreements between countries is now one global network of all countries and all governments and billions of people, with all levels of power, all seeking to grab a slice (or as many slices as possible) of the pie.
A force guided by money has no morals, yet is only as strong as those who feed it. The beauty of our predicament is that the consumer holds the answer. The consumer is the moral guide for capitalism.
