Peak Oil Essay

OPEN UP YOUR EYES

What responsibilities, if any, do businesses have in building a sustainable and convivial future?

“The Blind Spot” gives a realistic picture of the situation we are in now. This situation is: we can continue to consume energy and destroy our world or we can choose not to and destroy our economy. In this movie the main focus is on fuel and the problems related to it can serve as an example of other forms of fossil fuels. There are many concerns expressed in the movie that can be related to our question: What responsibilities, if any, do businesses have in building a sustainable and convivial future? The fact that the excess use of fuel started with industrialization, makes us realize the root of the problem: the businesses itself or to desire to make money.

First the problem should be identified. It is not just that excess amount of fuel is consumed, what should concern us is what we consume is more than what we can produce. In the movie they talk about a term “Peak Oil” which means “the global peak in oil production and it occurs when the amount of oil produced worldwide reaches a peak and starts a permanent decline.” (vt.peakoil.net). They foresee that when the oil declines it will not only result in an increase in the price but will effect many other areas things such as food, agriculture and anything that relies on consumption of oil. The movie also mentions about the global warming and how we treat our world in such a terrible way and destroy it. While we were doing many terrible things to our environment we did not think of the consequences rather we looked back and thought how much we progressed because we are industrialized, technologically advance etc.

Now it is time to take a step back and look at the picture in a realistic way. The fuel companies will not stop extracting oil until all the resources are finished. They do not really care of the results of their action. As they make believe game. You have to make believe that what you know is going to happen to you is not going to happen to you. But this does not change the situation.

Businesses should have certain responsibilities but that is not the case in reality for many of them. In an ideal world, all the companies would do a STEEPLE analysis which is a technique used for identifying changes that are taking place within that environment from 7 different points: Social, technological, economical, environmental, political, legal and ethical. All these aspects show us that business can do many things to change the world we live in to prepare a better future for next generations. The things they can change may not fix the damage that is already done to the earth but they might serve for a better society. With a right strategy they can increase the employment level, change their workers’ life style or offer them better living conditions. For the environment they can use the technology and decrease their harm to minimum. However, as we see in the “Blind Spot”, there can be liars to keep making money without thinking of the damage they are making in the long run. Instead of supporting the production of electric cars, they kept on sending harmful gas emissions to the atmosphere.

This does not mean that there are not “good” corporate which would try to do things for the earth. There are companies who are socially responsible and taking care of their environment. In the movie these companies were not focused, rather they were giving a more pessimistic perspective. There is a business model called corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its goal is “to embrace responsibility for the company's actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere”.   So if we go back to our question again: What responsibilities, if any, do businesses have in building a sustainable and convivial future?” If it is a business that has CSR, it can do a lot to build a better future. It can start campaigns, it can use the technology and limit its damage to the world, it can be respectful to the rights of its workers, by paying taxes it can support the society, it can care for the environment and so on.

            A business without any ethical objectives on the other hand, would not try to care more for the society surrounds it and the earth it is built on. It would just focus on making more and more money; it would be the one that can substitute human, nature, earth for money. Yet, we can not just put the responsibility on the companies since they are able to make money as we keep on consuming. By saying “You know, I have kids, I want peace on earth, I want all good things. And yet I found that people that also want those things unable to realize that we’re all a huge part of this problem.”, Jason Bradford, he touches on a good point. Since we are a part of the problem, we need to take action to solve it.

            First of all we should not let the advertisement brainwash us to consume more and more so that the companies will not keep on damaging the environment by extracting more energy from it. We can ask for more laws to protect environment, we can organize people to stand for their earth rights etc. Our ability to make change should not be underestimated. In the movie, Derrick Jensen says we can not save the day by buying energy saving bulbs but it can be seen as a starting point to get more aware of “What is happening around and what can I do to change it?” So we should stop thinking that we can have infinite growth on a finite plan, as he says.

             It is not very hard to find ways to make a better world. I believe the first thing we should do is to learn more and act more for this purpose. We inherited from this planet from our ancestors and will give it to our next generation. It is obvious that the generation before us did not take good care of it but we can fix things and make it better. We can not just leave the solution to this problem “someone who is smart/authorized” as in the example in the movie “smart people from Washington”. Thinking from this perspective maybe we should change our main question to “What responsibilities do we, as all people living on this earth, have in building a sustainable and convivial future?” Maybe it is time to open up our eyes and tell the others to open their eyes.