Oil Addiction: The World in Peril - 16
by Pierre Chomat (Universal Publishers, 2004)
translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder
Part II. Age of Excess
Chapter 16. Ergamines: Slave Labor
Our ability to afford three barrels of ergamines to fly us from San Francisco to Paris, and the ability of Gustave and his fellow farmers in Europe and the United States to burn more than a gallon of fuel a day putting food on our tables, is based solely on the bargain-basement prices that we pay for our ergamines. Our scientists sometimes refer to them as energy slaves, and slaves they truly are. When we acquire them, we pay only for the cost of their extraction, transportation, and refining - plus a little more in profits to their owners and developers, including some taxes for the government. But we by no means pay for the amount of labor that they replace.
But whether or not one is willing to consider them as slaves, calculating the theoretical "wages" of ergamines based on the silent labor provided by their unseen hands can be very enlightening. It is easy enough to do. If $24 is the price of a barrel of crude oil on the international market, the cost of 1,000 ergamines comes to seventeen cents. That is how much the exporter is paid for handing over 1,000 of his little slaves.
Once they have been transported, refined and distributed, these 1,000 ergamines (which make up a little over a third of a gallon) sell in US gas stations for approximately sixty cents. This is nearly four times their initial purchase price, and all this added value has been funneled, via industry and taxes, into the United States economy, not that of the exporting nation.
In the United States this brings the cost of one drop of oil, one ergamine, to .06 cents (six hundredths of a cent). In Europe, where taxes are much higher, ergamines go about for double that amount, or .12 cents. No matter what side of the Atlantic you are on, the amounts are paltry. They cannot be considered wages. They are less than charity. After a day of physical labor, an American or European skilled worker would take home at least $120. The labor provided by ergamines costs 100,000 times less than that of human beings! Habib is right: this is more like plunder! We pay the exporters cheap and consume their potential labor in quantities that are beyond wasteful. And yet we sometimes complain that gasoline is too expensive! Where does the truth lie?
A friend once pointed out that because ergamines are incapable of exploiting their own energy potential, calculating their cost in terms of theoretical "wages" makes no sense. Only their overall cost, including the cost of the human labor and materials needed to exploit them, would be meaningful, he said. He asked me to compare the overall cost of the ergamine, figuring in the cost of all the equipment and personnel that surround it, to the cost of labor for a factory worker, who also requires equipment and supervisory staff to do his job.
I thought the airplane, a very expensive and technologically complicated machine run by highly trained personnel, would be ideal for figuring the high-end cost of an ergamine with all its human and material entourage. It was certainly one of the best examples I could have chosen to illustrate my point. Again, the calculation was a simple one. I chose a New York-Paris flight, at a cost of $1,200 per ticket. For this trip, the plane usually consumes an average of two barrels of fuel per passenger, the equivalent of 300,000 ergamines. The price of one ticket covers not only the actual cost of the ergamines, but all of the other expenses generated by the flight: depreciation of the airplane, maintenance equipment, airport taxes, the wages of ground and flight personnel, travel agency fees, and other surcharges added in along the way. Therefore, by dividing the price of the ticket by the number of ergamines consumed per passenger, I obtained the actual cost of an ergamine at work. Dividing $1,200 by 300,000 gave me a cost of .4 cents (four tenths of a penny) for one ergamine consumed on such a flight. In comparison, the cost of a day's labor by a factory worker calculated in the same fashion is on the order of $400. This means the price we pay each of the ergamines that fly us from one continent to another is again 100,000 times less than what we pay for an equivalent amount of human labor. Perhaps we should appreciate our flights more than we do.
There is no doubt: the price we pay for our ergamines does not correspond to the value of the labor that they perform.
During all the years I spent in the petroleum industry traveling to nearly every corner of the globe, I have never come across a single colleague who has made this connection. If we want to be honest with ourselves, and especially with the generations that will follow us, we must admit that our exploitation of this easy energy is positively shameless. We pay so little for it, we consume it as if there were no end to it and no tomorrow. We use it to satisfy our every whim, without realizing that the energy we are frivolously wasting is in fact lost potential labor. What is worse, we give no thought to how we are depleting the Earth's reserves. We use ergamines to make our powerful cars run, sometimes just to go cruising around. We use them to transport apples from New Zealand and bottles of Perrier from France to countries all over the world. We use them to flatten our hills so we can build new cities. We use them to fly hordes of sleeping tourists through the clouds, to build tunnels out to islands, to construct roads and then light them at night, to carry sightseers and their cameras to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, and to send soldiets to capture oil fields.
An herbivore is content to eat the plants that he needs. A carnivore does not kill a gazelle every five minutes for pleasure or to turn a profit. But we human beings are different! We know the lure of gain. We are not content to satisfy our actual needs. We do not hesitate to exhaust all of our resources! "Always-more" is our motto, our mode of evolution! No doubt it, we have become "energivores!"
The ergamines have become our slaves. They exist mainly to move our egosystems forward. Our objectives are money, money, and more money. And we want it right now!
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder
Part II. Age of Excess
Chapter 16. Ergamines: Slave Labor
Our ability to afford three barrels of ergamines to fly us from San Francisco to Paris, and the ability of Gustave and his fellow farmers in Europe and the United States to burn more than a gallon of fuel a day putting food on our tables, is based solely on the bargain-basement prices that we pay for our ergamines. Our scientists sometimes refer to them as energy slaves, and slaves they truly are. When we acquire them, we pay only for the cost of their extraction, transportation, and refining - plus a little more in profits to their owners and developers, including some taxes for the government. But we by no means pay for the amount of labor that they replace.
But whether or not one is willing to consider them as slaves, calculating the theoretical "wages" of ergamines based on the silent labor provided by their unseen hands can be very enlightening. It is easy enough to do. If $24 is the price of a barrel of crude oil on the international market, the cost of 1,000 ergamines comes to seventeen cents. That is how much the exporter is paid for handing over 1,000 of his little slaves.
Once they have been transported, refined and distributed, these 1,000 ergamines (which make up a little over a third of a gallon) sell in US gas stations for approximately sixty cents. This is nearly four times their initial purchase price, and all this added value has been funneled, via industry and taxes, into the United States economy, not that of the exporting nation.
In the United States this brings the cost of one drop of oil, one ergamine, to .06 cents (six hundredths of a cent). In Europe, where taxes are much higher, ergamines go about for double that amount, or .12 cents. No matter what side of the Atlantic you are on, the amounts are paltry. They cannot be considered wages. They are less than charity. After a day of physical labor, an American or European skilled worker would take home at least $120. The labor provided by ergamines costs 100,000 times less than that of human beings! Habib is right: this is more like plunder! We pay the exporters cheap and consume their potential labor in quantities that are beyond wasteful. And yet we sometimes complain that gasoline is too expensive! Where does the truth lie?
A friend once pointed out that because ergamines are incapable of exploiting their own energy potential, calculating their cost in terms of theoretical "wages" makes no sense. Only their overall cost, including the cost of the human labor and materials needed to exploit them, would be meaningful, he said. He asked me to compare the overall cost of the ergamine, figuring in the cost of all the equipment and personnel that surround it, to the cost of labor for a factory worker, who also requires equipment and supervisory staff to do his job.
I thought the airplane, a very expensive and technologically complicated machine run by highly trained personnel, would be ideal for figuring the high-end cost of an ergamine with all its human and material entourage. It was certainly one of the best examples I could have chosen to illustrate my point. Again, the calculation was a simple one. I chose a New York-Paris flight, at a cost of $1,200 per ticket. For this trip, the plane usually consumes an average of two barrels of fuel per passenger, the equivalent of 300,000 ergamines. The price of one ticket covers not only the actual cost of the ergamines, but all of the other expenses generated by the flight: depreciation of the airplane, maintenance equipment, airport taxes, the wages of ground and flight personnel, travel agency fees, and other surcharges added in along the way. Therefore, by dividing the price of the ticket by the number of ergamines consumed per passenger, I obtained the actual cost of an ergamine at work. Dividing $1,200 by 300,000 gave me a cost of .4 cents (four tenths of a penny) for one ergamine consumed on such a flight. In comparison, the cost of a day's labor by a factory worker calculated in the same fashion is on the order of $400. This means the price we pay each of the ergamines that fly us from one continent to another is again 100,000 times less than what we pay for an equivalent amount of human labor. Perhaps we should appreciate our flights more than we do.
There is no doubt: the price we pay for our ergamines does not correspond to the value of the labor that they perform.
During all the years I spent in the petroleum industry traveling to nearly every corner of the globe, I have never come across a single colleague who has made this connection. If we want to be honest with ourselves, and especially with the generations that will follow us, we must admit that our exploitation of this easy energy is positively shameless. We pay so little for it, we consume it as if there were no end to it and no tomorrow. We use it to satisfy our every whim, without realizing that the energy we are frivolously wasting is in fact lost potential labor. What is worse, we give no thought to how we are depleting the Earth's reserves. We use ergamines to make our powerful cars run, sometimes just to go cruising around. We use them to transport apples from New Zealand and bottles of Perrier from France to countries all over the world. We use them to flatten our hills so we can build new cities. We use them to fly hordes of sleeping tourists through the clouds, to build tunnels out to islands, to construct roads and then light them at night, to carry sightseers and their cameras to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, and to send soldiets to capture oil fields.
An herbivore is content to eat the plants that he needs. A carnivore does not kill a gazelle every five minutes for pleasure or to turn a profit. But we human beings are different! We know the lure of gain. We are not content to satisfy our actual needs. We do not hesitate to exhaust all of our resources! "Always-more" is our motto, our mode of evolution! No doubt it, we have become "energivores!"
The ergamines have become our slaves. They exist mainly to move our egosystems forward. Our objectives are money, money, and more money. And we want it right now!
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
posted by Bill Totten at
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