Saturday 12 March 2011

Cistern bags won't save us from the system.

I spent Friday the 11th of March saving the world. Or rather, I didn’t, I stood for 10 hours in a local Sainsbury’s giving away free “energy saving kits”, wearing a cyan tabard that made me look as if I’d just escaped from Broadmoor via a freak printing accident, resulting in me having “I GIVE FREE THINGS” emblazoned across my chest. Most of the day was spent gazing into the horrendous pit of mundanity that consumes most peoples’ working lives in this world, interrupted occasionally with the great pleasure of guiding old people through the gargantuan task of filling in their name on a bit of paper, like some sort of morbid ferryman guiding a cup of poisoned apple juice to the lips of a Dignitasee. Oh, and also explaining to people that, no matter how much my foiled wrapped energy kits looked like microwaveable paninis, that I didn’t work for Sainsbury’s so I couldn’t direct them as to where to indulge their delusionally aspirational gambling habits, nor how to operate the change machine so they could convert their bingo money into notes. One man had over £300 worth of coins! I was very tempted to ask him whether he’d robbed a penny arcade, but he looked quite nervous, so he probably had and I’m guessing he wouldn’t have appreciated it if I’d brought it up.

Anyway, it was such an under-stimulating experience that I felt less like a human by the end of it and more like pond life. The most interesting thing I could come up with to do was a game I called “spot the weirdest shopping”. The winner was a Chinese man who bought 10 whole packs of Sainsbury’s basic tissues and a pot of honey – weird. Anyway, the product I was pedalling was a bag which one can fill with water and put in one’s toilet cistern to save about a litre of water per flush and a plastic adapter that fits between the shower hose and head that restricts water flow, achieving a similar saving. I proudly boasted to the public how utilising both gadgets could save them up to £100 per annum on utility bills. This, of course, was minus the addendum that they also had to follow an “energy saving guide” provided in the free pack if they were to achieve anything like this kind of saving.

The energy guide, although containing some genuinely worthwhile suggestions like “wash at 30o” and “don’t use a tumble drier”, was mostly filled with such obvious advice that Captain Obvious could not achieve such levels of obviousness, even with his extra special super power, that being: The Blinding Strike Of The Obvious. Such advice included: “don’t leave the TV on 24 hours a day”, “don’t take hour long showers” and “don’t heat your living room to similar levels of warmth as experienced in the desert”. This made me wonder how stupid the government really think the British public is. Then I remembered that this is the age of brainstorms, think tanks and grass roots (whatever the hell those are), and that these sorts of operations have millions of the tax payers’ pounds thrown at them so that “extensive market research” can be conducted in order to “optimise the effectiveness of the campaign”. Well guess what, the fruits of their labour must have concluded that Britons are totally thick. Scarily thick.

Peak oil is something that we really need to be worried about. Our entire species has become addicted to the stuff and we depend on it probably even more than a heroin user depends on getting their next hit. You may be familiar with what happens to a human body when one tries to rehab from heroin addiction: it usually involves a reaction so violently unpleasant that people need to be locked away in their rooms and sometimes even strapped down to their beds. This is basically what is going to happen to the world - and I’m not even being slightly melodramatic or sensationalist. Oil powers almost everything we call “modern life”. It gives us electricity, powers our cars and trains and planes, heats our houses, packages our food and drink, builds our cities and it’s even responsible for The X Factor. And Justin Beiber. 50 years ago it seemed so abundant that we developed a culture of treating it like an infinite resource and, although we were all taught in school how it definitely IS NOT, the human race still treats it as if it is.

You’d think that with all the smart people in White Hall and Washington that someone would have noticed by now and started enacting changes to wean us off our addiction. Well, they’ve encouraged us to recycle and use energy saving light bulbs and they’ve even started handing out free energy saving kits.  The problem is that probably more energy was used to make the plasticy bits of the kit than the contents could ever help to save – totally useless. This goes for all the other half-arsed energy saving initiatives that our government employs. Basically, it’s the equivalent of attempting to treat a malignant stomach cancer with a glass of warm Ribena. There are a number of very complicated reasons as to why nothing serious has been done, but it all boils down to a systematic failure of what 95% of the brainwashed people of this earth believe to be the corner stone of modern humanity: the free market. Extreme right-wing capitalism ensures that those with the most money rule. Who has the most money? Well, it’s obviously the oil companies, seeing as they are the dealers of this drug we are all so fantastically fond of. Money is power and the result of this is that the governments of the world are mere puppets on the strings of their oily masters. And there’s no way they’re going to give up all that power so easily – even if it means the end of the world.

Meanwhile, here in Britain, we continue to drive around in our 4x4s and indulge in exotic fruits that we don’t even need that have used 100 times more energy to get to us from Guava than the energy they will actually provide our bodies and, basically, we don’t give a shit. The problem we’re seeing now is that the dealer is running out of stock and so he’s starting to massively raise his prices. When petrol is suddenly £5 per litre and or utilities bills double and all the shops have to raise their prices to cope with extra energy costs and no one’s wages are getting any higher because all our employers are dealing with the same problems... then we will see the biggest shift in standard of living ever experienced in human history. Maybe when most of us can’t even afford to feed or clothe ourselves; maybe then we’ll start doing something about peak oil.

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