Sustainable Competitive Advantage:

America has done some very strange things with her natural resources over the years. During the Second World War we pretty much mined out the Missabe Range in Minnesota. We pumped a huge amount of oil from beneath Texas and other locations. Most of these resources went to defeat Germany and Japan.

Within several years of the end of that war a cold war with communist Russia and communist China was begun. Many can argue that those struggles were necessary and I am not going to get into that argument. I will only observe that America continued to use her resources at an alarming rate over the next several decades.

With the dawn of the new millennium America found herself running on empty. Actually the tank had run dry years before but the economy continued on the inertia of excessive spending by people who did not realize that they were bankrupt. America’s competitive advantage was a thing of the past. We were using other peoples resources to sustain the American way of life as though we had a god given right to do that.

Now comes the oil price shock of 2008. Actually I am of two minds on this whole higher price issue. I say this because there is no doubt in my mind that the burning of fossil fuels is in fact causing global warming. To slow and stop this phenomenon we simply have to reduce the amount burned. Given those facts how do you accomplish that task? One way to do that is to increase the cost of the thing you are burning to the point that the average citizen sees that he is throwing away a major part his paycheck. Then and only then will he support efforts to replace fossil fuels with some source that is more sustainable and less damaging.

Would it not be ironic if the very people we are pissing and moaning at for being religious children who bicker incessantly among them selves prove to be the very people that force the west to change (mend is a better word) their ways and take care of the earth as humanity’s home.

I feel we have not seen the worst of this crisis so long in coming. The triage of the American economy is going to be very ugly and very brutal. Can the country survive as we know it? This crisis is so deep and so important that in fact it may change the very nature of America.