OK. I'm generally a happy chap. Cycling makes you happy. It makes you feel good and keeps you nice and healthy.That's a very good reason to cycle. Another good reason is environmental. Cycling really is a good way at reducing your carbon footprint. However, that reason seems completely eclipsed when something like the Mexican Gulf oil spill happens. There's more oil coming out of that broken pipe everyday than I will ever consume in a whole lifetime.
A recent piece in the right wing newspaper the Daily Telegraph was headlined "Don't Blame BP".
Hmm!
It's general thrust was that we as a society, especially in the US, demand so much oil that BP were just serving society and this accident was inevitable because we are so demanding.
It is actually a good point. But BP were responsible for this particular tragedy and so they really are to blame.
In the same vein, we as a society were responsible for the economic crisis. During the Thatcher years we were transformed into a greed ridden consumer society.
We want more.
We are never satisfied.
This greed requires money. Banks were our sources of a never ending flow of cash to feed our consumerism. And like our oil companies who have to get oil from more difficult places and even from sand, banks had to develop more and more experimental techniques to keep that flow of money going. So it was inevitable that there would be a financial disaster. We are to blame. We have built a consumer society with advertisers fueling our addiction, manufacturers constantly creating new versions of things we already have but somehow the new one is the one we must have and banks supplying the money so we can get it. Perhaps a free market driven society isn't so good for us after all? We need to develop a new economic model for society that isn't based on consumerism.
With what money our nations still have, can we get our best brains working on this? If we can, we will get to a point where we won't demand so much oil, we won't demand so many things, we won't consume all our natural resources.
If we can develop this model quickly we may even reduce the impact of global warming.
In the meantime, I'm going to get back on my bike to cheer myself up.
