What about a lack of energy? By Jonathan Bird (Translated by Spirit Pony)

The following essay was written by Jonathan Bird, an activist at the Israeli section of the Venus Project.

As of today, we have no need for petroleum, coal, natural gas or any other polluting source of energy. We have more than enough energy.From the Sun alone, we have enough energy for thousands of years.Geothermal energy, meaning the heat at the core of the Earth, can also be used as a source of energy that'll last for thousands of years.And not to mention tides, wind, ocean temperature differences, undersea currents and more... all of those can be used in addition. The primary reason these sources of energy are not used, is not because they are not efficient, their energetic potential had been demonstrated long ago.

The reason they are not used is because it is impossible to profit off them.In other words, if someone wanted to carry out a project to build huge air cleaning structures, he'd have to go to a private investor and ask for money, to fund the project.However, the investor will then ask, "how are you going to charge people for this service, so that I can make a profit off of my investment?" If the guy then tells him: "Well, listen, we aren't going to charge anything for this. It's just a project to clean the air, to end pollution. I mean, you breathe air, I breathe air, everybody does. We want clean air." The potential investor will then say "that's nice, but I can't give you the money if I'm not going to profit off my investment." Nobody is going to fund a project if they aren't going to make more money off it, than they initially invested in it. It doesn't matter how important the project is to public health, the environment, or the survival of human civilization. It's just not going to happen.

When people say that a certain product has high costs and expenses, what do these costs consist of? I mean, a Nike shoe is made from the same materials as any other shoe, rubber, some cloth, so why does the final cost of the product run into the dozens, even hundreds, of dollars? The answer is profit. There is Nike's profit, the supplier's profit, the profit of whoever rents Nike the factory and/or land on which the factory is built on, and so forth. Essentially, all those costs and expenses, are profits. And if someone invents some type of wheelchair, and files a patent for it, that also contributes to the high costs.Sometimes a product costs $5 to produce, but sells for $5,000, because of patents. This makes it difficult for whoever needs a wheelchair, for example, to obtain one. Most profits are made by just a few people.

So why is a shoe so expensive? Because we're carrying on our backs all the big profiteers. So when they say that the cost of a single solar panel is expensive, they don't mean that we don't have enough glass, or silicon. That's ridiculous.We do not have a shortage of silicon, or sand (from which glass is made), on this planet.Those are not scarce resources.What they mean when they say it's expensive, is that we don't have enough money to cover all the profits that all the corporations which are involved in this process, require and demand. However, if all resources are common heritage, everybody shares their ideas, without patents, without private property, then the cost of the project does not matter.What matters is whether we have the resources and technology, which we do have, more than enough.

In addition, if today one factory is set up, a spare parts factory won't be set up next to it, because the real estate price has gone up, so it is moved somewhere further away.A third factory is set up even further away from both of them, and the result is that we now need a train to travel all over the country in order to manufacture things.

The capitalist system is one of the most wasteful systems imaginable.

In other words, there are many people who try to calculate how much energy is required to sustain society, and eventually draw the conclusion that renewable energy won't be enough.However, these people also think that we need airplanes, cars, inefficient cities, planned obsolescence, infinite growth, and many other factors, that in an efficient society, won't be needed.

We don't have a shortage of anything today, other than brains in the government.