AMAZING SIMILARITIES!!

AMAZING SIMILARITIES!!

What do Anti-drillers, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, entertainment stars, Mid-East oil/gas magnates, and individuals past and present all have in common? It’s wishful thinking that the answer is the punch line to a joke. Instead it’s straight from the annals of fairly modern history. If you followed the recent specials on the H2 network (history channel), you would recognize the tactics employed by some of those above … and many people today vary little. As technology has advanced naysayers have always been present. Their reasons have also varied only slightly.

MONEY and MISUNDERSTANDING

John D. Rockefeller waged war against Edison and his financier J.P. Morgan because the electric light (Direct Current) was going to make the light produced by his country-wide supply of kerosene old hat. Imagine what it must have been like to control the source of light for America, and then have an invisible thing like electricity take it all away! Scare tactics were used to stop that from happening. They involved spreading the word through newspapers and “scientists-for-hire” that electricity would be the ruination of safe, comfortable lifestyles. Fires that mysteriously happened in buildings using the new electricity supposedly proved this theory when they burned.

Then Nikolai Tesla invented Alternating Current electric lights which proved to be better for multiple uses, and it was Edison’s and Morgan’s turn to “bad-mouth” electricity, i.e. the kind NOT produced by them. Any famous person that could attract an audience and spread the word that electricity of any kind would bring down life as people knew it was encouraged to do so. The above names had the modern-day equivalent of billions of dollars at their disposal in defense of whatever resource they owned and wanted to use to secure their fortunes.

We don’t need to be overjoyed that electricity won out causing these gentlemen to lose fortunes and die paupers. They didn’t. Technology in other forms gave us new types of transportation, so that although the market for kerosene declined, gasoline demand has far surpassed it. Today oil uses go far beyond gasoline. Our uses for AC and DC electricity have expanded more than anyone could have imagined during its “youth”. Nowadays the “fight” is for natural gas, its growing multiples uses, and its accessibility through directional drilling … ALL made possible by advances in technology.

***

If the only way people can see themselves advancing financially or even maintaining the status quo, is to spread fear through staged demonstrations, the press, political pressure, or total misrepresentation of something they don’t understand …

Then How Far Have We Really Come?

Janice L. Hancharick