Of hybrid, the West and oil

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Of hybrid, the West and oil

by Michael Dibiaezue

"Technology is now a terrorist tool that ensures concealment, weaponry, deployment and finance. Terrorism can only be a technological pollutant because what pollutants do is to kill with rampant abandon. What use are technological goodies in the face of today's nuclear, biological and chemical tendencies? The argument that technology's good points overrun the bad ones is unnatural against these propensities."

28-06-05 Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek columnist, wrote and brought his impressions to bold relief by simulating a broadcast by President George W. Bush. It said "It is now possible to build cars that are powered by a combination of electricity and alcohol-based fuel with petroleum as only one element among many. My administration is going to put in place a series of policies that will ensure that in four years, the average new American car will get 300 miles per gallon of petroleum. This revolution in energy will reduce dramatically our dependence on foreign oil."

The West is doing every thing in its power to achieve this and their intentions are not for altruistic reasons. The euphoria for hybrid technology hides a joyful wickedness to open up the oil wells of weaker nations for uses, industrial and technological, that put all of us at great risk.
There are no sustainable alternatives to oil and they know this, except cheap oil. There are no alternatives to the businesses, income and employment it generates and whereas substitutes can be found for oil, this will impose extreme economic dislocations.

From exploration, lifting, transportation, refining, distribution, manufacture and marketing, the profits and income from oil, and its accessories which include fraud, sabotage, theft, security, espionage, maintenance, are phenomenal and perhaps unknown. Oil sustains global economy, from shoe polish to paints, plastics to pipes, pesticides to fertilizers, carbon to optics fibres, automotive sustenance, computers, medicine, agriculture, chemicals, and even into space, it is all about hydrocarbon and technology. It is endless and its presence is like air. It is this fusion that feeds a new desperation to conserve oil.

Most transports, marine ventures, warfare and even long winters are considered a drain on industrial economies and their technological potential. They believe these consumptions burn up global reserves and are wasteful, making costs unbearable, in the face of applicable substitutes and incredible profits from technology. There is no doubt that modern technology has displaced petroleum products as the West's best seller. The concern for industrialized nations therefore, is that hydrocarbon, which now powers modern technology and their well-being, is still being burnt as petroleum products at alarming rates that would leave their new-found economic power in the lurch.

Societies are pampered into addiction by the luxuries and comfort oil maintain, severely reducing the quantum that should be globally available for generating income and profits through technology for the West, and at a hundred times the rate and distance at which petroleum products do. Reduction of global oil consumption in comfort zones, home, leisure, transport and luxury, converts into a huge availability that knocks the bottom off oil prices. The West's feeling is that unwanted consumption makes oil a seller's market and that its curtailment would reduce dependency and the desperation for it. These considerations now compel policies by leading industrialized nations, covertly, which support the high price of petroleum products and pump price, to discourage such tendencies and create interest in alternative sources.

High prices, for the West, are one way to recoup income from unwanted consumption and another way of making the cost of such use felt. It is the price we pay to burn fuel or for depriving them of its industrial and technological uses. Reduction in global oil consumption will bring these uses to frantic levels and above-surface reserves supplemented in continuance of supply. Oil blocks in producer-nations will be bought and left idle due to technology's slow intake, unemployment will rise and these governments will be cash-strapped and desperate as more oil, securing loans at cut-throat interest, are obtained.

The search for alternatives to fuel-driven cars is from this desperation to make oil more available for technology. The advent of modern technology and its exceptional profit has renewed Western dependence on hydrocarbon, and its profitability is next to none in all history. Technology's calibrated, slow and precise use of hydrocarbon to do this makes its industrial longevity irresistible. The real factor that excites the West about hybrid and electric cars, and this endeavour continues in several other areas, is the hope that it will cut global oil consumption unusually, to obtain cheap oil. Green effects of hybrid technology do not impress them but are strong arguments that facilitate this intent. If they did, the West would apply the same resources and more, devoted to hybrid technology, into containing industrial and technological pollutions. A comparative analysis of the impact of automotive traffic and emissions with modern technology on our environment mirrors an inverted priority.

The diversionary focus on fuel-dependent cars as global guzzlers and pollutants masks the frightful extent of Western industrial and technological pollutions. Technology can be many times more calamitous and unexpected than warfare. Nuclear tests, accidents and exposures, petrochemical combustion, emissions and flares, chlorofluorocarbon, halons, toxic and radio-active wastes and materials are the world's most potent pollutants that poison our planet and cause green house effects. There are other consequences, like technological “errors” that produce poison as multivitamins or cyanide for oxygen and today, it has reinvented terror as we live under nuclear, biological and chemical threats. Nuclear bombs transverse the globe as briefcases and a single drop of some chemical or lab-grown virus can poison or kill thousands of people.

These situations are made possible by technology, which enables the easy access of materials and formulas that evolve destructive passions, through the internet. Technology is now a terrorist tool that ensures concealment, weaponry, deployment and finance. Terrorism can only be a technological pollutant because what pollutants do is to kill with rampant abandon. What use are technological goodies in the face of today's nuclear, biological and chemical tendencies? The argument that technology's good points overrun the bad ones is unnatural against these propensities.

Nothing compares to industrial and technological pollutions that have left a ceiling of smog and uncertainty from Europe to the Americas and all over Asia. As the epidemic spreads, industries are moved to less developed nations, under various economic guises, reducing pollutants and risks in these developed countries and transferring them to such nations. Industrial and toxic wastes, such as the West produce, are most times irreversible and irreducible. Nuclear reactor accidents, detonations, toxic and radio-active exposure where they occur, are known to leave citizens stranded and cities uninhabitable for as long as fifty years!

More oil for industrialized nations mean increased pollutions, global degradation, industrial accidents, terrorism and blue-print theft by rogue states. Once technological information and pollutants are acquired, they cannot be switched off but remain intellectual property that can exert excusable extremes. Technology bears huge cost that kill profit to enslave us. We will pay for its use, proliferation, demands and excesses as even its speed and lack of borders impede or prolong detection of cyber-crimes. Its universality will fuse international jurisprudence and governments into a new world order and we will pay to police virtual reality. Privacy and liberty will wither as we slave for technology, but the force majeure may yet be sudden death with a big bang!

The very premise of begging for debt cancellation is wrong, especially for Nigeria. It is atrocious for any government or institution sustained by democratic fiat to provide funds that strengthen tyranny and dictatorship. The question these governments and institutions ought to answer is to whom did they give their money? What business did they have giving money and aid to military dictatorships and accepting their patronage? Surely, whatever business they had was with some military junta and not the Nigerian people. They paid out their coffers to what was clearly, and to the democratic world, an illegitimate regime that held us hostage with guns. They ought to have known better not to give such loans to pariah regimes, and the most ridiculous thing that can be added to this, is to pass such debt to a displacing democratic government, and as if there was nothing to be ashamed of.

To front multinational financial institutions as debt collectors is coercive fraud and to pay them is democratic political betrayal. The Nigerian people did not have a say in it and know nothing about such transactions, and the West should not expect that our cherished resources will pay for their indiscretions. It is perplexing that some Western governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars removing illegitimate governments all over the world and still, loan money to some, dubiously, because technology pressures them for a continual supply of these nations' vital resources. This conduct is the violent rape of a producer-nation and its people that directly assaults our being as this glue of financial entrapment sets and strengthens, holding down the progress of less fortunate nations.

Loans are taken and secured by recipient nations with their vital resources, as more loans are pursued to discharge interest due on them. It is a vicious cycle designed to make any nation prostrate, as precious resources are made easy picking for industrial nations. To argue that such loans were given to relieve pressures of sanction or keep us breathing while they figured out what to do, if not patronizing, is at best humanitarian. It crucifies to bait such profit from anyone's misfortune. The US National Intelligence Council report was found wanting on the impact of such entrapment for sub-Saharan African's future.

If freedom is truly on the march around the world and that indeed, African countries desire peace and prosperity then illegal governments along with the commitments they make must be forbidden and disowned. It is not about debt forgiveness or relief but its denial, and bad deals that exhibit poor judgment and the callous disregard for an oppressed people. The West cannot eat their cake and have it; it cannot claim to be the flagship of democracy and yet, disrupt its realization. Debt denial is about the essence and decency of community. Fairness, peace and the sense of justice that permit us to live as free citizens of one global democratic society.

All we are saying, is that the greater percentage of loans, presumed given to Nigeria, were given by Western democratic governments and institutions to rogue regimes that were not vested with any mandate whatsoever, from Nigerians, to preside over their affairs. And that it was given, not to us, but in the knowledge and furtherance of our oppression, by the West for its own benefit and progress. This cannibalizes democracy.

Hybrid technology is therefore, another way the West hopes to impose consequences that will cripple oil-producing nations. The severe and rampant economic dislocations this will cause may be beneficial to the West, as they instigate political upheavals or the violent overthrow of governments.

These pressures make illegitimate governments jittery and amenable to economic or political conditionality, or both. Here, illegitimacy may be condoned, through emergency laws and coups, to protect Western interests, as these societies degenerate into conflicts that showcase the wicked cost of technology. These methods specify crimes against humanity.


This Day Newspapers, 28th June, 2005.