A pre-business plan I did recently for a would-be energy co-op startup; badly in need of a bit of editing, the piece was never properly finished when their seed capital died on the vine:
1. On Energy.
From transportation to manufacturing to the industrial food machine, energy is the unequivocal lifeblood of the modern world, upon which the lives of billions of people utterly depend. Yet paradoxically, energy has also become our Achilles’ Heel, enslaving us to the whim of undesirable regimes even as it unravels our ecosystem.
Dire omens abound in the natural world -- species as common as frogs marching inexorably toward extinction, the fabled northwest passage open and navigable for the first time in countless millennia, worldwide weather patterns topsy-turvy to catastrophic effect. It should be clear that sweeping change is nearly upon us, and that such practices as the day-to-day operation of 750 million motor vehicles worldwide1 will remain neither practical nor feasible.
As such, environmental imperatives, once easily and routinely dismissed in the business plans of mainstream industry, will no longer wait for the sake of the short-term profit. Granted, growth must be the watchword for boards-of-directors, who remain answerable to shareholder interest -- but unproductive growth, or worse, counter-productive growth in destructive modalities ultimately subverts the long-term viability of the market. In the body, we know rampant counter-productive growth as Cancer; left unchecked, its effect is terminal.
Thus we approach a crossroads where we have to concede that not only does contemporary energy policy -- being inextricably bound to the petroleum industry -- not serve our interests, it’s actually counter-productive to those interests, and in fact must be considered antithetical to any acceptable vision of America in the second half of this century.
The leaders of tomorrow’s industries must become apt stewards of the public interest, especially with regard to environment and ecology. As threats such as ozone depletion, global warming, species’ endangerment/extinction, pandemic morbidity from rampant toxicity penetrate -- and ultimately galvanize -- the national consciousness, only the most stalwart defenders of the status quo can remain apologist to the industrial paradigm -- eventually those too must change, or be left behind by tomorrow.
Along with the ticking clock of our impending environmental catastrophe, another clock counts down to the economic catastrophe that will be the practical exhaustion of worldwide oil reserves. By many credible accounts, international petroleum production has already moved beyond the peak of its parabola -- in the years ahead, the ongoing production trend will be to decreased capacity and increasing scarcity until our industry at last exhausts the resource. If petroleum is not replaced as a practical fuel source, demand will at last destroy the remaining barriers to the plunder of our any and all national resources, from national parks to wetlands.
As petroleum becomes more precious so the price will continue to rise, eventually making gasoline automobiles impractical, to say nothing of air travel; and as the oil industry implodes, its spasms are bound to recoil disastrously through every sector of the economy. Clearly, our industries must shift in advance of that eventuality -- already are shifting, in fact, as evinced by the booming market in hybrid and alternative-fuel automobiles.
Thus it’s in that bracing reality -- again, paradoxically -- that we find unprecedented opportunity. As we approach ‘do-or-die’ thresholds in our ecology, and with the end of the age of oil now in sight and threatening the length and breadth of our economy, energy once again becomes a new frontier of virtually unlimited market potential for forward-thinking firms.
Thus a clarion call is sounded: so the progressive must hear, and answer.
Such a call last went out in early 1942, and the American economy exploded with the gearing up for WWII, stoking an economic furnace that drove us for nearly the rest of the century (stalling, ironically, only with the first major tremors in the oil market). While we may not face such a polarizing moment in national consciousness in the spring of 2008, that day is surely coming, a tipping point, threshold of a new era to which most of us have long looked forward in either anticipation or dread.
2. New markets for a new era
Market forces are inherently sociological, reacting spasmodically to tidal movements in national consciousness. To put such in purely mercenary terms, when sound business practice intersects urgent public interest we anticipate windfall revenue potential. The penetration of such products and services into mainstream markets effectively amplifies the tidal change in market sociology. Thus the trend accelerates, approaching that tipping point -- an event known in nuclear science as ‘critical mass.’
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