Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Branson has exposed himself to charges of hypocrisy by backing a third
runway at London's Heathrow airport and of creating Virgin Galactic to
promote space travel.
Energy conspiracies
The energy sector has historically been vulnerable to conspiratorial prac-
tices. The 150-year history of oil has been marked by collusion, ranging
from the Rockefellers' Standard Oil Trust, which was broken up under
US anti-trust law a century ago, to today's international cartel of OPEC
oil producers. But it also lends itself to an extraordinary number of con-
spiracy theories. Perhaps it is because we have a need for energy that is
almost as universal as our need for air: we'd like it to be free as air too,
and some of us feel that there must be something wrong because it isn't.
We have already looked at the part that lobbies, cartels and alliances play
in today's climate-change debate, particularly in the US. The fossil fuel
lobby has called global warming a hoax concocted by greens and scientists
to justify closing down the oil, gas and coal industries down - and for
their part, climate activists have labelled their opponents climate-change
deniers, a phrase intended to smack of holocaust denial. But energy con-
spiracy theories pre-date climate change: they go back a long way.
Typically they involve alliances of governments and special interests
alleged to be conspiring to suppress some innovation in “free energy”
in order to maintain a status quo based on increasing fuel prices. And if
the inventor or promoter of the “free energy” dies suddenly - as has hap-
pened in a couple of the cases cited below - suspicions of foul play fuel
the conspiracy theorizing.
Free energy
We owe numerous electrical inventions, including the
alternating current that powers most electrical motors, to the brilliant
Nikola Tesla, who pioneered electricity in the US in the late nineteenth
century, along with Thomas Edison. But in later life Tesla, who only died
in 1943, theorized about many other things - among them free-energy
devices and power sources able to propel aircraft and flying saucers.
A few of Tesla's disciples, especially American physicist and author
William Lyne, believe that the US authorities hushed up Tesla's power-
source theories for fear they would disrupt America's oil and auto
industries.
Some people believe that the US government may still be in the
