Where's the green revolution investment bubble?

A friend pointed out an article in the lampoon newspaper "The Onion" that reports how the US investors are desperately looking for another bubble to invest in like the Internet, real estate and sub-prime mortgage bubbles among others. See link here: http://http//www.theonion.com/content/news/recession_plagued_nation_demands

While this article is a parody, this is really how our economy works since the powers that be in the US are phasing out the manufacturing sector and some of the service sectors in our economy. Our economy just seems to be one big Ponzi scheme or three-card monte game.

The next bubble was supposed to be the green revolution, an economy that revolves around alternate energy sources. This was one of the platforms that Obama based his presidential election campaign on.

This for some reason has not taken place and the green revolution doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight.

Sure there are all electric cars coming to market like the Nissan Leaf, and Honda has a hydrogen version of the Accord but there is no re-fueling infrastructure to support them. I also saw a report on Nova about new thin solar panel cells and at the time the television program was produced the company that was manufacturing them, United Solar Ovonic, had a two year back log. Now by checking out Google News I have found that this company is laying off workers because their supply is surpassing demand. This doesn't make any sense. If the US Government was really committed to the green revolution this is where they should step in and help create a green infrastructure of electric and hydrogen fueling stations and help green companies like United Solar Ovonic find a market for their product.

This is not happening and investors are not coming to the rescue, because they do not see the money making potential in green technologies. But why? Because as I have stated here before, I think investors and the US government know that whatever green technology comes about oil will be sure to undersell it and ruin it. Even if it green ventures never become truly commercially successful, they could at least help the economy by driving the price of oil way down. This in itself would be a big help to the economy, but investors are not in the altruism business they are in the money making business therefore it will never happen. But at least government should be stepping in to help out, but they are not.

This also is why you cannot expect a free market to operate altruistically, and you need government to step in to be the altruist, but they cannot because big business keeps their hands tied through lobbying. Investors are not going to get the green revolution going because they are afraid they won't make any money and government hasn't stepped in to make sure that the right thing is done.


It is all up to the US Government to get the green revolution bubble going. This should be the priority over having another bailout for failing US banks and business, and it is not only the economy at stake, it is the environment as well.

Population control: The ultimate way to go green!

From Al Gore to your local school children the pressure to conserve resources, recycle, and preserve life on this planet is coming at us from many directions. I think Mother Earth is shouting at us herself with the depleted ozone layer and the melting ice caps; scary stuff.

What no one ever calls for anymore is population control. This seemed to be a concern in the late sixties and early seventies, but it has vanished completely from the media and pop culture. Does anyone remember the movie "Soylent Green"? This seems to be a taboo topic, perhaps because it goes against God's command in the bible, to be fruitful and multiply. The Catholoic Church and Right-to-Life conservative Christians are not really helping things either these days.

And while some countries like Japan and Italy are reporting population shirnkage, coutries like the good old USA are picking up their slack.

I realize that it is moraly wrong to take away peoples' reproductive rights (but don' t tell that to the mainland Chinese with their great "one child" policy). But you can give them incentives not to have children. For example let's take away the income tax deduction we give to people with children. Let's stop giving welfare moms more money with each child they have.

I would go as far as giving school tax refund and other government sanctioned incentives to people who are voluntarily steralized and have no children. It's a radical idea that will surely be faced with great oposition, but not really for the reasons that you might think.

You see the upper class, the wealthy people of the world, understand the basic laws of supply and demand, if the supply of laborers goes down then the cost of employing them will go up. This will then cause inflation to go up which means that rich people will have to pay more for their yatchs, mansions, and luxury cars among other things.

However it is a much greater cost if the earth is destroyed and man, more than any other force on this Earth, has proven to be its great destroyer. We must listen to Al Gore and other green proponents, but we must also consider the fact that the best way to preseve this world's resources is to use less of them, and the best way to do this is to have fewer people.