LETTER: Technology, the side effects not cheap

To the Editor:

I have an alternator in my car that produces inexpensive and renewable electricity; the only drawback is it can’t light my house or a small city. There was a story a few years back about a steel fabricating company in Montana whose light bill was $1 million a month and climbing. Boy, there’s a utility company that knows how to milk its customers.

Anyway, what they did was they bought six old diesel electric engines from Union Pacific Railroad Co. and wired them into their plant’s electrical grid. They ran two engines at a time and when they needed servicing they would shut them down and start the next two, pull the service and then restart them when they were next in rotation. With the payments of purchasing the engines, the expense of buying diesel fuel in bulk, which was a savings, their light bill dropped to less than $70,000 a month.

I have a cell phone, and who doesn’t? Last year over 100,000 accidents were caused by driver distraction. My phone bill several years ago was $10 a month, now it’s over $200. A year ago I had to buy a special box for my television to get a signal that I used to get for free. The cell phone companies needed the air waves.

Ever heard of Love Canal? It was a small town in New York that had to be abandoned because of the chemical spills a company was dumping into the local water supply. Many people died as a result of the pollution. There is an abandoned town in Russia called Chernobyl. The Russians will give you a tour of the place if you don’t mind being radiated thousands of times more than normal.

There’s a thing called the Hazardous Waste Super Fund here in America, it exists to clean up with your tax dollars what bankrupt companies left, without saying goodbye, won’t pay for. There are 1,280 contaminated sites nationwide.

What do all these things have in common? Well in the beginning special interest groups claim all this great technology will created thousands of new jobs and make all our lives better. But most importantly, technology has an evolutionary scale. In time, Jean Luc Picard and the Enterprise will be here.

In fact, government rewrote hundreds of laws so these new technologies will be created because that’s what special interest pays them for. After the disasters government rewrote thousands of laws to protect us from this sort of thing.

Kind of makes you wonder who’s the greediest in this scenario, and who gets to pay for it?

In a way it’s like the side effects written on the bottle of your prescription for depression. You may experience cancer, kidney failure, heart attack or stroke, but you won’t die from depression. Years ago there was a saying amongst the hippy culture, ‘free love.’ Love might have been free, but the side effects weren’t cheap, and all those shots.

Robert Pike

New Richmond

Tags: letters to the editor, opinion