Bailout And Precaution

THE international motor industry is a major cause of the problem. Despite all kinds of efforts to convince them to build better vehicles that could form part of a model of sustainable development, they chose to keep on manufacturing old-fashioned fuel-addicted status symbols and wasted many opportunities to catch up with actual developments. They even went so far as to sabotage their own technical achievements such as ev1 of General Motors and other models of other companies, just to keep up the system of dependency on oil for individual mobility.

Instead of investing their heavy profits in research and implementation of a future-oriented, sustainable concepts of mobility, they ridiculed, belittled and even sabotaged any attempt to bring societies out of the dependency on oil and other fossil fuels. Now they are standing there begging for donations, which will – if granted – reduce the financial space for future generations even more. They have the audacity to say that they must be financed to be able to continue with the same wrong business policies, which are the cause of their misery. Therefore, any donation of taxpayers’ money given to them without clear commitment to get rid of the dependency on fossil fuel and put the combustion engine in the museum where it belonged since the nineteen seventies.
For Namibia all this requires the crossroad-like decision: Do we want to go the old way, which has proven to be an unsustainable one-way road that benefits a few clever clogs who get rich from the fact that they sit in the crucial positions where fossil fuels are traded, graded or levied, or do we want to skip the errors of the industrialised world and leapfrog to the New Age of sustainable, decentralised renewable energy supplies. If we make energy accessible in the rural areas we will see development happening there. Pumping, manufacturing, cooling, and first and foremost education will find much better conditions than now in ALL corners of the country.
The difference is basically that centralised fossil power stations are easily controllable and force anyone who wants to do anything meaningful in the economic arena MUST buy from them. ‘Solar energy is freedom-energy’, because like any other renewable energy source it can be produced and controlled by the local communities.
Now comes my question, fellow Namibians: do we want to follow the (US) American path which leads into recession as we can clearly see now or do we want to have more power for the people?

Get It Right, Via e-mail
Note: Name and address provided – Ed