Feeding our Enemies – Ending the Madness
Kenneth Muir
Have you ever wondered what you can do to positively and dramatically change things for the better? After all, you are just one of 6,800,000,000 on this earth. The answer may be far simpler than you think but it involves thinking differently. It also involves taking your own simple actions and duplicating them over and over again to turn your “one drop” action into a massive wave that helps to quite literally leave this earth in better shape than we found it.
Of course you know that starting with the number one, who is you, and convincing another person to take the same simple actions you propose is astonishingly challenging. The secret is to make a simple, rational, reasoned case showing that what you propose is fully in the best interest of not only the person you are trying to convince, but also in the best interest of everyone else. If you were to convince one and the two of you were able to convince four and those four, eight and so on, you would only have to repeat that process 34 times to cover the population of the entire planet. This is very likely where every multi level marketer starts, and where a vast majority of people who have considered the MLM process stop dead in their tracks. It’s never easy convincing just one person, let alone billions. That’s why giant corporations spend billions of dollars every year on marketing and advertising. Appealing to the masses through saturation advertising is the best way to peddle what you’re selling, whether what you’re selling is good as in healthy food, or bad as in cigarettes.
My take is not unique as I am just another blogger with opinions like the rest of us. My hope is that my message will resonate with enough of you to encourage you to take the same actions I have, to make things better. There is simplicity in this message. My hope is that simplicity helps clear away all the muck that’s out there and allows you to see why what I am proposing makes so much sense. Here we go.
Think about this, there are close to a billion cars on earth today. Lined up end to end, that is a line of cars 2,462,121 miles long. That’s a solid string of cars stretching to the Moon and back 10 times. Every one of those cars has a tailpipe which is used to exhaust the pollution from the internal combustion engine it’s attached to. Imagine all those tailpipes put together. Is that a tailpipe you would want to live near? Now for the sad reality; you do, we all do. Those tailpipes and their engines are spread from coast to coast and beyond our borders all over the planet. Developing nations like India and China are adding them as fast as they can. Now remind me why that would not have a devastating effect on our planets breathable atmosphere?
I’m not talking climate change here because I am not a scientist, but seeing a picture in our minds of all those tailpipes surrounding the earth should give us cause to consider the incredible volume of pollution that would certainly seem to have more than just one negative outcome on our planets ecosystems, especially the air, and the water. Remember, the air pollution is washed onto the surface of the earth and into its oceans on a regular basis.
How can we possibly not see with just common sense alone, that we must take actions to begin to reverse this trend and come up with a better way to transport ourselves from point A to point B?
Now think about this. Every time you buy a car you have less than a day or so of driving before you start to have the feed that car with fuel and money to keep it moving. Try to look at it this way, the very first time you pull up to the pump, remove the gas cap, swipe your credit card, grab the hose and insert the gas nozzle into the tank, when you pull the trigger on the nozzle imagine the clicking sound on the pump meter also creating a negative clicking sound in your bank account. Of course you know this but take it a step further.
Picture the smiling face of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud while a refined product of his oil flows into your tank and your money flows directly from your bank account into his bank account. Of course the oil can be coming from many sources including Hugo Chavez and many others who would love to see the land you are standing on one day becoming theirs. The bottom line is the transfer may not be direct but having middle men getting a piece of your pie should not make you one bit feel better.
This is just the first time you will feed and invest in your shinny new internal combustion engine vehicle. You will repeat 30 to 50 times a year for the rest of the life of the vehicle. How much money is that and what are you really doing?
What you are really doing is spending 1 ½ to 2 times the cost of the vehicle over the life of the vehicle on gas, oil and maintenance alone. If you spent 25,000.00 to purchase that vehicle you will spend another 35,000.00 to 50,000.00 gassing it up, getting oil changes and maintaining it, making the total cost of operating your 100 year old technology internal combustion engine vehicle 65,000.00 to 75,000.00. What you are also really doing is literally burning what you are buying, complete with putting the emissions from that burned product permanently into the air you and your kids breath, then coming back for more when it’s gone and doing it all over again, time and time and time again on an indefinite basis.
We all know what we are doing, but we are lazy and afraid to think about it enough for it to change what we are doing. Filling the gas tank is easy, we think, but we are afraid to confront the increasingly costly ways we are bleeding ourselves dry. Paying for one tank at a time is fine because it’s only 40.00 – 80.00 a pop, then we don’t have to think about it for another week or so.
We never consider that each and every one of us who drives in America sends 100,000.00 dollars each during of our lifetimes to foreign lands that we are making wealthy beyond imagination. That’s money out of our pockets and out of our country, into the pockets of those who hate us and seek our demise. What do we have to show for it? Other than the pollution we’ve created, exactly nothing! We burned what we purchased, remember? They still have our money don’t they? They buy our banks and businesses, they lobby our politicians and work very hard to keep this madness going year after year while we stand at the fancy new gas pump and watch shorts and commercials on monitors while we do ourselves in. I almost hate to make you aware of this but in my generation; America will have sent over 23 trillion dollars to oil countries and oil companies to keep our little habit going. That’ almost as stunning as the giant one billion car exhaust pipe. The scale is stunning but the reality is, we must face it. Facing it together as a Nation united would be so much easier. Together we can bring about the required change as rapidly as possible.
We are not only fighting wars halfway around the world to make sure the oil keeps flowing, literally spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of young American lives, as well as countless lives lost by our allies and of the citizens of the countries we are fighting in, but we are actively participating in the most massive transfer of wealth from the most powerful nation on earth ever witnessed. We are responsible for our actions and it is far past time to put a stop to this madness. The next time you hear, “drill baby drill” go back to the numbers and realize the madness of a phrase like that.
We burn lots of things we buy. We burn natural gas or worse, oil to heat our homes. Some of us burn wood in our fireplaces or woodstoves and when that’s gone we go chop up more wood and burn some more. We burn coal for our electricity and do that on an indefinite basis as well. If you’d like to see how well mass implementation of coal fired power plants works I suggest you go to Shanghai, China. I was just there in March of 2010. It’s a city of 25 -30 million people. They are choking on their coal dust and now they’re adding millions of cars at an astonishing rate. China has seven of the most polluted rivers in the world, so polluted the water can’t even be used as non-potable. They now lead the world in respiratory illness and Shanghai is the new leader in lung cancers. It is very sad to see China did not learn from the West very painful lessons regarding unchecked industrialization. There is hope as they are now moving as quickly as possible to convert to sustainable forms of energy.
I say there is another way, a better way, a cleaner way and a more secure way to meet our energy needs. At some level every single one of us can start to move in that direction.
Believe me when I tell you, it is not easy, or cheap to start changing. My wife and I have been trying to buy an electric vehicle for over 10 years. For one reason or another we have just missed small windows of opportunity to join the small but growing number of people seeking to drive pollution and oil free.
These forward thinking EV drivers have a mantra; “charge baby charge”, and most of the folks we know are charging their cars with solar panels making them as efficient and clean a technology as possible.
In the long run it is the right thing to do and unlike what we are doing now, every one of these new actions do not have the perpetual madness of burning and paying for the rest of our lives. On the contrary these new things actually have many benefits. Near the top of that benefits list is that they provide what every businessman urgently seeks on a daily basis, return on investment.
Imagine a small company who installs solar panels on homes operating a fleet of trucks charged by solar power. The savings in not having to provide gas for a fleet of vehicles would be dramatic and would create a leg up on every one of their competitors. Their cost would be lower and their profits higher. Their competition would have to continue to adjust prices of installs every time gas prices spike. Just like the sun rising, you can count on gas prices spiking right during the time a business can afford it the least.
Now let’s look at a new way.
http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com/
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/03/fords-electric-transit-connect-purrs-for-drive-on/1
That’s right, electric trucks are real as in right now, today!
With electric the charging is cheap, (1 - 2 cents a mile to operate), and much cheaper when charging with solar. There is no internal combustion engine to maintain, (electric motors can last 1 million miles in Electric Vehicles), no oil changes, no transmission, no fuel system, no exhaust system and zero pollution! Even brakes last 5 - 10X longer because electric vehicles are designed to brake with the electric motors before you even have to touch the brake pedal. Even if the electric truck was twice or three times as much in initial coast, you are not pouring thousands of dollars into it over the life of the vehicle like you do with dirty internal combustion trucks. Plus, there are government incentives that help businesses cover the initial cost. Believe me, I have done the analysis and the money saved is dramatic. The first business that starts driving all electric vehicles around with no fuel or maintenance cost will catch the attention of their competitors very quickly and the whole thing will snowball.
So what are we doing to help make things better?
1. We have purchased a Hybrid that we hope to convert to a bio-fuel plug-in vehicle in the future. It will fun on electricity most of the time and when it needs to re-charge while driving it will use bio-fuel to do so.
2. We have had solar panels installed on our home to help reduce the load on the grid and help charge our cars. As solar technology improves and incentives grow, we may be able to upgrade this system to cover all our electricity needs for our home and our cars.
3. We hope to purchase an all electric Nissan LEAF in the fall of 2010 and use that car for our primary source of transportation.
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/?dcp=ppn.39666654.&dcc=0.216878497
4. We are installing super efficient LED lighting in our home to implement the conservation piece of this plan
5. We have committed to replacing all our appliances with the most efficient possible units as they fail. This way we can spread the cost over the years.
6. Our ultimate goal is to not burn oil, imported or otherwise. Electricity or bio-fuels only. Hopefully we will be able to completely phase bio-fuels out too as battery technologies continue to advance.
We feel these plans are the patriotic to do. Taking these actions not only benefits us in reducing our cost but helps our Neighbors, our Nation and our World by leaving less of an energy impact and getting our pollution output to as near to zero as possible.
We also feel these actions will help us with fixed cost during out retirement. We don’t want to have to deal with higher energy prices and skyrocketing gas prices when we can least afford it.
The bottom line is, we want to be able to look at our children and grandchildren and tell them we did the right thing, not just for us but for them too. We want to be able to tell them we had their health in mind when we made these decisions so we could be an example for them and their kids. We want to be able to sit with our family and watch a sunset over whatever city we are living near and enjoy a beautiful pollution free view.
