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Yes it is puzzling. Switz. is very green and ecologically minded, has a hands on democracy, and the vested interests are not oil lobbies or car/machine manufacturers or the military-industrial complex, so called. .. Corps, all the same, eg. Bank-insurance and Big Pharma. And CH produces a LOT of arms.
And yet the picture is very similar.
It seems to be the case that ‘oil’ (fossil fuels) is so tightly wound into our ‘modern’ economies that the very thought reducing their use is frightening; for the present economic scheme - capitalistic growth- to continue, oil must keep on pouring in and giving forth its miraculous free lunch. Without it, or realistically, with mild or sharp reductions in availability, so much changes that no-one can really contemplate it.
This attitude is shared by pols (who want to be elected or remain in place), the ‘economic milieu’ (who wants to keep earning pots of money with their businesses), and ‘the people’, mostly employees, who want their children to succeed, want to drive a car (even a second, why not?), want to indulge in expensive leisure (planes, ski holidays, trips to the mall) and generally consider that living standards, including medical care for. ex. have to rise. Disabled people, special ed kids, and pensioners live off the investments made by their ‘funds’, which have to perform, return at least so much %.
Not new, I know. Says little about the future. The point is that much of the tortuous discussion and real life attempts re. green energy and renewables are attempts to maintain the status quo, if only psychologically...those in the know (vested interests, savvy Gvmt. types, the military, etc) understand that much of the ‘diversification’ of energy proposed is not reasonable, cannot really function (EROEI, long term considerations, etc.) so their response is luke warm or muted or even scornful.
It is not puzzling at all. Oil is simply the cheapest way of moving a machine the size of a car. Even in Switzerland. Even if you are a free thinker. Even if you believe that global warming is the worst problem humanity has ever had to deal with. The fact that using oil at current market prices is the cheapest of fuels useful to power an engine the size of a car is a fact.
It won't stay that way. And that is when change will happen. Not when people come to their minds and not when politicians decide to making changes in the law. Not even when Toyota offers a plug-in hybrid. It will be the day when oil will stop to be cheaper than something else.
As for renewables... they are on the move. Solar and wind have become mainstream industries. You can count the number of years until they become the darlings of every politian on the block (local, state or federal) on two hands because both solar and wind are labor intensive. They both will create jobs far beyond any other energy industry. And that is when people will start to care. Do something against the solar and wind industry in the near future and you will reap political hate and voter's revenge.
It has nothing to do with the oil. It has everything to do with individuals demanding cars - this is universal phenomenon everywhere around the world. Cars are a typical "tragedy of the commons" thing. Individuals think that their car will contribute nothing to the problems we discuss here, but with time the cummulative effect of so many cars inevitably excaberates the problems.
In this regard we behave like spoiled kids, who demand that we are given the toys we want or to be left out lingering in the night clubs but are moaning when we have to face the concequences - for example poor education or ruined health. My solution would be not to listen to the kids and follow a longer term program. Make them toil for their toys (e.g. expensive mobility) or simply not giving it to them at all.
But of course this is utopical suggestion in our current arrangement - the whole idea of democracy, the way we have it now revolves around giving the kids what they want.
People have always wanted and possessed personal transportation, and producing and fueling it always used to be a major industry.
This is not a new phenomenon.
For most of human civilization, it was known as a "horse".
Very few people could afford to have a horse in preindustrial society. Indeed, in countries such as England it was ILLEGAL for commoners even to ride horses, much less to own them. Horses were reserved for the "equestrian class," a tiny aristocracy of less than five percent of the population.
In the U.S., horses, mules and other draft animals were so scarce (prior to about 1840) that for hundreds of years men would hitch up their wives to pull the plow; only the rich slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson could afford to ride horses.
At the height of prosperity of ancient Rome, a few aristocrats had chariots or slave-born chairs for personal transport. Most people put a lot of miles on their sandals.
"Very few people could afford to have a horse in preindustrial society. Indeed, in countries such as England it was ILLEGAL for commoners even to ride horses, much less to own them. Horses were reserved for the "equestrian class," a tiny aristocracy of less than five percent of the population.
In the U.S., horses, mules and other draft animals were so scarce (prior to about 1840) that for hundreds of years men would hitch up their wives to pull the plow; only the rich slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson could afford to ride horses.
At the height of prosperity of ancient Rome, a few aristocrats had chariots or slave-born chairs for personal transport. Most people put a lot of miles on their sandals."
That was not true in land rich and frontier areas like America. Horses were so common that Virginia passed a law allowing people to geld any horse running loose that was less than some specified height. Horses were what you used to keep down the trees while you waited for the roots in your 'cleared' acreage to decay enough for you to plow. That was because trees were so common that you just girdled the trees so that they would die and dry out, then burned them to clear them as cheaply as possible.
Tree land (where you pastured pigs on mast) was nearly free, pasture land little more expensive. Fenced or walled farmland was what cost money. The fences and walls were to keep the damned horses, cows, pigs, and sheep out of your crops.
Horses in 'settled' countries like Europe, India, and China, really were prestige objects that cost a lot to own and operate compared to cattle, especially larger horses that had to be grain fed instead of hay fed like ponies. Oxen were common draft animals for that reason.
In that good old horse-loving land of Virginia, what percentage of the black people owned horses? And what percentage of the population were black? Although the shortage of livestock was not as bad in the original colonies, such as Virginia, only rich folk rode, well into the nineteenth century. In 1850 in Missouri, only half the farms were wealthy enough to have even one mule.
Just because the white planter/aristocracy was worried about the excess of scrub horses, that tells you nothing of how the ordinary folk got around.
Virginia is a very strange case - in the counties where plantation style cultivation was practical (for simplicity, call it the Tidewater), the slave population in 1800 ranged from as high as 69.8 to a majority ( http://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/pop1800numbers.html ). However, in the Shenandoah/Piedmont (also West Virginia in 1800), the percentage was often under 10% - covering possibly a quarter of the white population. (You can also see why splitting off West Virginia in the Civil War was practical, beyond the geography - the people there weren't generally slaveholders and weren't economically reliant on slavery.)
However, in terms of how rare horses were - Virginia has the only 'wild' horse population in the Eastern United States, which tends to argue for the fact that horses weren't all that uncommon, otherwise they would have been captured and sold off, likely in numbers which would have destroyed the population.
There is a major difference between 'urban' colonial America, like New England and Tidewater Virginia, and the 'western' America which grew after the Revolutionary War - that 'western' area (Charlottesville, for example) did not suffer for any lack of horses or mules, in part because like cows, such animals can live in fairly hilly/steep terrain which is not that useful for other activities, except logging, where horses/mules are an asset. However, in the areas which had been colonized for a century or more at that point, horses were an expensive burden, as the farm land was no longer as fertile, and logging was a dead industry.
Of course. In Spain a 'Caballero' or horseman was a term equivalent to 'gentleman' or 'person of means' in a society where the common 'hombre' walked and, if he was lucky, had a small burro to carry the burdens.
Sancho Panza rode a burro . . . but was it owned by his master, Don Quixote?
Both the ownership of horses and that of swords was restricted to aristocracy in Europe; they did not want peasants, even rich ones, getting any uppity ideas.
The counterpart to Caballero was Peon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon
"In its obsolete usage in Spain itself, the word denoted a person who travelled by foot rather than on a horse (caballero)."
This word obviously carries derogatory connotations in English.
Limited access to 'horsepower' is probably why efficient hand digging and cultivating tools were once so common. In Spanish they are called an azada, in India a powrah, in english speaking areas they are simply called a digging hoe or a planter's eye hoe. You can still get them at the site http://www.easydigging.com/
Greg in MO
It was never illegal for anyone to ride a horse in England. Stealing one is another matter.
True. Now, if only we had one billion horse carts back then, and we had to feed those horses with a straw only coming from a large granary in the Middle East, and if those horses changed the climate during the centuries, then now we would have had the experience and would have known what to do about it. Phew what a long sentence...