I recently watched the documentary "GasHole" and I was amazed at some of the ideas it brought it up. For those who haven't seen it, the film starts off with an older gentleman talking about being at a race track in the late 1940s and the man he met that had a modified carburetor that allowed his vehicle to get nearly 100 miles per gallon. He sold the patent for his invention to Shell Oil, became a millionaire and never made another one. Next was a young man in the 1970s who altered the engine of his car and drove 205 miles on two gallons of gas. He was later found dead of a supposed suicide from a drug overdose. When another man tried to imitate his idea, he had his life threatened.
Realistically, I shouldn't be too surprised that big business has always been run like the mafia. They strong arm people to get what they want and if that doesn't work, the problem people just disappear. Why is our government giving this industry subsidies? With record profits being made, why are we handing them money to line their pockets with? I know that collectively we don't have the money to be just handing back to the rich.
The part of the film I found most interesting had to do with the bio-fuels. It baffles me that oil companies are putting a higher priority on making money from a resource that will be exhausted in the foreseeable future. Think of the damage we are doing to the planet by drilling for oil. And before you call me a tree hugging hippy, I'm looking at it from a layman-ishly scientific way. We live on a ball that is made up of layers, and as we systemically tunnel through and remove some of those layers, we are also destroying the layer we live on with the pollution. How long can it go on before the planet, in one way or another, collapses in on itself?
Okay, maybe the world disintegrating is a bit of an extreme view of what we are doing to this planet. But it cannot be denied that sooner or later the oil reserves will run out. Then what?
If oil companies want to continue to be profitable, they need to start investing in bio-fuels. No matter how you look at, alternative energy sources are the future. Why are oil companies not cornering this market? Why are they dragging their feet like spoiled little children that want to get their way? It seems to me that if we have the technology to put a man on the moon (from forty years ago at that), we should have the technology to get better gas mileage in our vehicles. We should have the technology to create cleaner burning fuels and reverse some of the damage done by older technologies.
I may not run a multi-billion dollar business, but even I can see that discrediting something new just because it will decrease your profits down the road is not smart. Companies remain profitable by innovation. They create the future through inventions that better the lives of the consumers and make the world just a little bit better place to be. My advice to oil companies: quit worrying about taking out the little guy, and focus on what will be necessary in the future. Create and perfect the bio-fuel engines, invest in crops and renewable resources. If you don't, the effects of your actions today will eventually kill the people whose money you are after.
