27 August

A story of three photos. Of European genius and American swindling. Have posted before that the electric motor was invented over 100 years ago. By Michael Faraday, holding the glasses. The first workable cars were electric, like the one pictured made by General Electric. There were early attempts to make combustion engines, but they were inefficient, clunky, filthy and noisy. Nobody took them seriously, because they were so bad. So why did history end up only rediscovering electric vehicles, a clearly superior technology, more than a century later, spending 100 years building petrol and diesel engines? That’s the other picture, the fella with the moustache. John. D Rockefeller. Still the richest person in modern history. He made oil available, cheaply. That was the only reason the internal combustion engine was ever used. It was rubbish technology right from the start. It still is. But the oil was made cheap. It may be the decision that ends our civilisation. More than 100 times the combustion gases released by our huge bushfires in 2019 have been released into the atmosphere every year (on average), for the past 263 years, because of combustion engines.