Friday, March 04, 2005

The Corporation

I watched a very thought provoking documentary today, called the Corporation. It was better than one of Michael Moore's documentaries because it was not as one sided, in fact, a good chunk of the screen time was taken up by CEO's of large corporation's opinions.

I've always had difficulty grasping the economic concepts and results of a corporation. How legally, it is considered a person (yep, how absurd does that seem.). How the stock market works. How they hold all loyalties to the shareholders, not workers or the community. I suppose indirectly a Corporation is bound to the public, because if the public has a bad image of it, it's bottom line decreases.

This lack of responsibility has caused corporations to "dig too greedily", so to speak. People speaking out against them has helped in many cases. Collective concern for the world is increasing. In this film, many of the past CEO's realized this, and were working for sustainable manufacturing and products.

I thought to myself, this idea of sustainability is extremely important. Now I'm not an environmental extremist, but I see "the problem" facing the world in my lifetime : oil either running out or becoming so scarce that it is no longer efficient to extract it from some remote reserves. I remember reading that the world's oil supply will only last until approximately 2030, though I understand it is impossible to know exactly how much oil there is.

Will we make it by then? That is, have enough of the world's energy needs running on sustainable power rather than oil? I do agree technology is moving towards this, but the question is, fast enough? I'm fairly confident that still far more research effort is going to oil and such rather than alternatives to it.

Who knows what the next revolution will be.

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