Michele’s Freeminding

I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. Oil is bringing us down the drain.
If we — actually our governs — don’t act immediately, we’ll face rough consequences quite soon.

Oil has become such an important resource, it probably is the most important one: can you imagine your everyday life without oil? I can’t, because oil is present in so many things — nowadays almost everything has plastic in it, and plastic is, most of the times, made from oil.
Oh, and the fact that most of it comes from unstable countries doesn’t help.

Our economy grew without considering oil as a limited resource, instead it has been perused and no interest has been put in developing alternatives.
Just a quick — and not incredibly smart — example: bottles. Bottles were once made of heavy and clunky — and re-usable! — glass, now they’re made of light, practical — and not re-usable — plastic.
So what’s the problem? Plastic bottles are much more practical than glass ones! Yes, but they’re made of plastic.

We must change our economy from one based on oil and other non-refurbishable resources to one based on renewable energy.
We have some of the technologies we need, they might be still rough on the edges, but it’s better than nothing at all.

Even though I think everyone agrees we must do something about this, I don’t really know when our governs will make something really concrete about it.
Why? Interests!

A quick example: go check 2006 Fortune 500 and tell me who’s on number 1 and 4.
And then tell me which is the most profitable industry.
You do the math…

Even though we’re not the one in charge of changing the economy, we can still do something and maybe try to change it from the bottom.
For example, we can buy hybrid cars, we can plan for solar panels’ space when building a new house, we can use our trusty bicycles and we could also use some care towards ecology.

I want to wrap this up with a quote from a well-known italian comedian/activist: “Stone Age didn’t end because of a lack of stones.”

This post was written 2 years, 4 months ago on April 25th, 2006 late evening.