Re: Output Falling in Oil-Rich Mexico, and Politics Get the Blame
On Mar 12, 2007, at 4:00 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
It is certainly impossible to calculate “the position of private wealth-owners in the social system” forty years from now, but barring an apocalyptic end of civilization as we know it, if fossil-fueled industrialization is to end sometime in the near future, it has to be replaced by an alternative into which a great deal of investment is already being made today, in a fashion that coal was overtaken by oil. Is such investment being made now?
The early oil and auto businesses were not characterized by big
investment. Ford, for example, complained about how Wall Street
wouldn’t fund him - which, it’s said, contributed to his virulent
anti-Semitism. We just don’t know what could pop up in five or ten
years. Of course, just waiting for something to turn up would be a
bad policy, and we should be spending oodles on energy R&D now. But
just doing a straight line extrapolation from the present is pretty
dodgy.
Doug