Arab Oil Barons smack the US into submission

The cost of a barrel of black gold –literally black gold – topped the $100 mark yesterday, and guess what? We’ll never see it drop below unless a new fuel source is adopted – and pretty damn quick!

The problem with $100/barrel oil is that America WASTES, yeah I said wastes, oil by using it damn near exclusively for transportation – sure we have some electric cars, but they don’t have any market penetration and hybrids still use gas and some modified form of one of the most dangerous inventions known to man – the internal combustion engine. Cars are the worst muthafucking pollutant-producing technology – that doesn’t have to be the way it is, sure it’ll take the auto companies to financial task and the brink of ruin (as if they’re not already there) to create cars that don’t use gasoline or use limited gasoline but why isn’t that on the tip of every presidential candidates tongue? Congress could just pass a law – to sell cars in America you need to have X mpg, but since we all know that Detroit can’t design or manufacture technology of that quality, Detroit should be given a tax break to enable it to produce the updated cars. Japan and Europe won’t be able to get the tax breaks, because they’re not American incorporated companies.

I said in a previous post, gas prices aren’t what people really need to worry about – technology and a mindset shift will get us all on alternatively powered vehicles. Where ever-rising oil prices are really going to slice the planet’s dick off is in the manufacture of plastic.

The fact that recycling isn’t a LAW that has severe financial punishment for non-compliance is a crime in itself. Just last night, I was cleaning up my filthy rooming house bathroom and kitchen, and there was like 5 trash cans with mixed garbage throughout – and at least 30 beer bottles (my housemates waste a LOT of disposable cash on beer and wine, especially considering that one of them is a alcoholic Russian chick who fucks for money and sustenance, but that’s another post) and maybe 12 to 15 soda cans – and as I live in Los Angeles there’s that CA Redemption value on all these recyclable materials. Yet no one thought to cull the items that could generate enough loose change for a bottle of laundry detergent.

Recycling plastic needs to be of paramount important, and finding was to reclaim plastic from landfills or when it’s supposedly non-recyclable is where there needs to be R&D at the major university labs.

You know what’s really FUCKED UP? Americans junk around two millions tons of electronics into landfills

EVERY FUCKING YEAR!!!

Can you honestly believe that? The lack of recycling of dead electronics is shameful, because there’s some many chemically dangerous, but no doubt reusable parts in that old PS2 or large screen tube TV that can save on the continued use of raw resources – but NOOOOO, we’re not about recycling that shit. I seem to remember some story in The Economist or maybe BBC Online about how in African countries – the dumping ground for a tremendous amount of dated electronics – people operate slipshod smelting furnaces spewing a noxious smoke cocktail the world is in denial about in their backyards to cull bits and pieces of copper, mercury, coltran (that ever-expensive metal needed for wireless communications) and aluminum; they risk their health for these dangerous metals that were no doubt strip-mined from their country in the first place 24 months prior! Not to mention

Tech waste is the environmental problem du jour, replacing Styrofoam and disposable diapers. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation: If recycling it doesn't really result in it being recycled, and tossing it out just clogs landfills, what, exactly, are we supposed to do with this stuff?

That’s a question that Global Warming Environmentalists don’t talk about, and it’s where more and more R&D needs to be spent. In fact computer and electronics manufacturing companies should come up with the solution through some sort of legislation, something akin to the Green House Gas Credits concepts. Or maybe there should be extreme Tax Breaks offered to companies that can come up with ways to recycle all that plastic-coated wire and solder.

Now I might seem like a socialist or an extreme left-wing liberal by proposing all that the flawed, corrupt, “in the pocket of big business like a fascist regime” and bullshit-to-the-core American government pass laws to help with the environment. But let’s not kid ourselves, big business DOESN’T GIVE TWO SUCKS ON A DEAD DOG’S COCK about doing anything but maximizing profits, so fact CEOs can have 10s millions in bonuses.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich stated in his book SuperCapitalism that we are supremely foolish to believe that big business will do anything for the public good. They might align themselves with public sentiment if that sentiment means more cash flow (i.e. the whole jump on going “green”) – otherwise, it’s more raping of the public while the public subsidizes its own sodomy!!!