Are The Oil Companies And Governments Stifling Renewable Technology?

To get a good answer to this question, we have to look at the structure of things. The information that prompted this thinking was that a good long-time friend of mine mentioned that he had heard that the rights over things such as solar panels was owned by the oil companies. My initial thinking was different from his, he immediately looked at it as being a negative, and that the technology would be held back by the shareholders who had oil interests in order to perpetuate their oil profits.

Market Price Versus Production Costs
Speaking of which, if you have something that is in the ground, and you extract it and sell it, and then it gets scarcer and so market prices increase, then the extraction presumably has roughly the same costs, yet the profits increase.
So, that establishes that it is definitely in the best interests of the shareholders of oil to continue holding those shares until the price peaks, which of course might well be an infinite process, at least until a firm alternative to oil is found, which might never happen, as there is a ratio between population and energy requirements that might depend more upon decreasing overall energy consumption than attempting to replace the actual energy levels that the world is currently using.

The Funding To Buy Obstruction Of Progress?
So, if we have a group with major amounts of money, who have a financial interest in stifling alternative technology, then the unfortunate truth is that they have the power to do so if they decide to have a strategy to perpetuate oil consumption. They have the funding to purchase all other probable means of future energy supplies, and so, they could go two ways - one would be to buy up all other potential resources to control the transition to a pace that perpetuates oil and maintains price growths of oil, and the other would be to buy up all other resources in order to have investment income once oil becomes technologically the dinosaur it is made from.

The Middle Road?
But there is a middle road as well. They could be doing both. This would explain why there is very little actual government backing throughout the world for alternative energy research. Bearing in mind that the politicians are generally working for the corporations rather than the people of their own particular countries, then such stifling would surely be successful. Also, if you have read this blog in the past, you will know that the conclusion of the whole global set of problems is due to short term thinking by those in power both in the corporate world as well as the political one, who have their own interests as a priority instead of that of their own countries.
Hmmmm, that is an interesting thought.  If the corporations that the politicians of a particular country are looking after are based  in a different country, then would that make this propensity of politicians to work in the favour of those corporations into a situation that has a name generally connected with spies selling secrets against the best interests of their own country? Probably not, as the corporations will have divisions that are specific to the country that they operate in. In any case, we have to really keep the thinking global, as there seems little loyalty to countries any more, now that the governing is corporation based. Interesting........

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