It’s not just accidents like in the Gulf that take their toll on the ecosystems of our planet. CO2 buildup in our atmosphere and waste that results from the harvesting, manufacture and consumption of products associated with petroleum, also paint a bleak picture for our natural world to come. If we do nothing to alter the disastrous course we are on, then we will expedite our own species’ demise, and that of countless others.
To go straight to the point, the world's worst oil disaster (WWOD) that I speak of is our perpetual overconsumption of the stuff and the consequences associated with that. Like the leak in the Gulf of Mexico, running like a wide open faucet until someone finds a way to turn the handle closed, mankind’s increasing demand for petroleum based products will statistically guarantee more of the same ecological degradation in the future. That is, if we do nothing to innovate our way out of the failed system that is no longer meeting the energy requirements to safely power all of our ways of life.
Fuel demand will increase proportionally to an increase in population. It would be naive of us to think the event in the Gulf is the last oil disaster to come. Let history be the harbinger to how greater petroleum consumption will drive further ecological and atmospheric destruction in the future. We need to do something about potential disaster tomorrow, by doing something constructive about moving away from fossil fuels in a technological and policy way, today. Otherwise, there will be more failed drill rigs, leaking tankers and, possibly, terrorist destruction of transportation and storage facilities to come. News stations may benefit, but at the expense of environmental catastrophe.
You’d think after 911 we’d get it. Who’s to say that a deranged individual or group doesn’t commandeer a 10,000-gallon oil tractor-trailer truck smack into a high value target like a school, hospital, government building, police station, passenger train or even worse, a train carrying toxic and/or explosive cargo in a densely populated area? C’mon, terrorists are innovators too. Monkeys are known to innovate! Flying airplanes into buildings was a first. Frighteningly, oil transport tractor-trailers are defenseless against a terrorist attack, because no one is expecting that sort of thing, there are no safeguards in place and such attacks will not be broadcast over the Internet beforehand, just like 911. Our preexisting economic jitters could shake uncontrollably, causing havoc in global markets, once the terrorists show how innovative they can be.
Let the disaster in the Gulf be the wake-up call for us that sets the wheels in motion to wean ourselves from consumption of oil and its consequences. That which we invent to conserve and supplant petroleum has to come with far fewer, and much less devastating, possibly, irreversible, ‘unintended’ consequences. Whether with solar, wind, alternate fuels, or a combination of all of them and then some, we will not create our way to the solutions we need through innovative designs only. More specifically, designs that consume less fuel to heat buildings, cook food, transport us and fuel our machinery must be affordable to the masses for the seeds of change to root. Consumers’ purchase decisions are inevitably affected by price. With that said, we must creatively design products with affordability guiding design. Saving ourselves and fellow species through innovation will only be realized if the new products are obtainable by the masses. Then can we make a meaningful dent in our demand for petroleum and stop our destruction of the natural world.
As consumers, we can demand safer products, not just ones that make stockholders rich at the expense of every other more important consideration.
There’s another huge obstacle to overcome besides design and price: great designs only ever become great products after they’ve survived the initial gauntlet of trials and failures, from design shortfalls to the troublingly difficult money end of the development course. Every new product became one because there was funding for prototyping and patenting, financing for manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Obviously, a new product needs to sell to satisfy going concern. Interspersed within the product and market developmental stages are the battles that must be won against the foes who would enjoy the innovator’s failure. Competition and money attract greedy, ruthless, even fraudulent businessmen and government overseers, and only one who has ever experienced firsthand elements of the corrupt side of capitalism can appreciate this. As one who has been through the gauntlet, I assure you it’s real and ever present. The American Dream is the illusion that mostly comes true for the few and powerful. To the rest, American Nightmare would more accurately speak to the reality of the typical entrepreneur’s situation. This must change if we are to save ourselves in the long run. We must all see this beast for what it is and conquer it if we are to foster innovation, in all industries.
I have 3 patents on forced hot water heating system designs that assemble with virtually one tool, therefore, requiring much less skill necessary to install it. By flattening the learning curve the installation time is cut by 90%, thereby removing much of the labor cost. With my invention the installation of a radiant floor heating system can now be cost competitive with a baseboard convector system. It is common knowledge that radiant floor heating uses a 1/3 less fuel (gas, oil, wood, coal, electric, etc.) than its baseboard counterpart and is a much more comfortable means for heating buildings and their occupants. If the cost to construct my radiant heating system design is the same as a standard baseboard heating system, and it uses a 1/3 less fuel once installed, then why wouldn’t anyone buy it? The product has to be available for sale before anyone can buy it, and like me, most innovators fail to reach that very basic level of success.
Independent inventors in small businesses account for the largest sector of innovative people in this country, yet they are the most likely to be adversely affected by the potholes in the road to success. Funding through to market penetration is tantamount to success, but so is a level playing field.
Not that our government needs to provide funding to innovators directly, it really needs to protect innovators from the factors within its control that cause innovators to fall out of the game. 98% of independent inventors fail to ever make a dime from their inventions. 2% only ever go beyond breaking even and even then fewer still get rich enough to call themselves that. Obstacles to innovation need to be removed by policy for innovation to thrive. Our elected and appointed officials must protect our ability to exist in the future by supporting all innovators, not just Big Business. Surely this could bring our economy back to growth by creating jobs associated with research and development and tooling and manufacture of new products that will help save us from the brink, that otherwise awaits us all. This could be our most important industrial/technological achievement of the 21st century; our new economic power center. We win in countless ways. People are back to work and have money to spend and, while we don’t really save our planet – our planet will be around long after we are gone, we save ourselves and innumerable other species that we will detrimentally affect through our unchecked consumption of petroleum.
We have the collective intelligence to, both, stop the leak in the Gulf and create new technologies that make us increasingly less dependent on oil. But big business and its unfair competitive advantage is strangling the life out of innovation. Oil is a toxic substance throughout its different physical stages and it needs to be replaced with safe product alternatives. Crude spewing out of the sea floor and SO2 and CO2 spewing into the air are equally destructive and hazardous to the survival of all species on earth. We have to change all of this before the damage cannot be undone.
From this viewpoint, our governments need to act, but I’m afraid that, first, citizens need to take charge through power of grassroots activism and political innovation in order to excommunicate the dysfunctional self-serving interests in government. I’m not sure we have that fight in us, as we may be out-gunned. We may have already sealed our fate by creating an unchangeable government bureaucracy that by design invites only the well-to-do and monetarily connected. Our democracy has been hijacked by the money that comes from Big Business. Can government even protect the environment that ensures the survival of us all, the very citizens that elect its officials? Do we really deserve the officials that we elect? Look at what they have allowed to happen in the Gulf and around the globe. We deserve better and must ascertain it.
If governments can succeed in fostering the development of the innovative processes that will save all of us, then they will have to begin by leveling the playing field to include the little guy. Somehow, we need to spin “special interest” into a special interest among officials who hold the power in their hands to save ourselves and the natural environment we live in. If we fail to affect technological and policy change and we destroy our species and natural world as we know it, then the world’s worst oil disaster will take on its final meaning.