“Eat, sleep, work, consume, die”. A lifetime of chasing the carrot and trying to outrun the stick. Is this really the best we can do?

What a waste it will be if Kevin Rudd’s 2020 visioning forum is blinkered from the start. As the old blues song didn’t quite put it, “Brother can you spare me a paradigm?”.

Let’s have all the options on the table. Who says we have to work seven hours a day, five days a week? See the flashy new stuff in the catalogue, there’s the carrot. Put the whole lot on your Bankcard, that’s the stick.

In the beginning, religion gave us one day off each week to pray and then last century Henry Ford came up with the idea to give his workers another day off to play. The canny old industrialist realised that there had to be fun time to consume, like going for a nice drive in the country in your very own Tin Lizzie.

And since then ... what? Is human evolution stalled at the point of us spending a stressful amount of time working so we can then indulge in unsustainable consumption? Maybe there are people out there who would find working a bit less a real drag, but they’re not in plague proportions.

So anyway where was I? Ah yes, the 2020 thingy. There are predictions and extrapolations going every which way in think tanks all around the country. My pet subject is electricity generation ... are you listening up there in Macquarie Street, or do I have to send over a crate of Scotch?

Recently, I stumbled on a website mysteriously called ‘The Natural Edge Project’ and funnily enough it has nothing to do with the telemarketing of steak knives after midnight. What it does have is an impressive collection of lecture notes produced by the CSIRO and others on a wide variety of technical topics.

On the subject of electricity generation, pricing and supply, many of the articles delve into this important area with a detail rarely seen or heard in the mainstream media.

Here’s a good term I found, ‘decoupling’. No, it’s not about Thomas the Tank Engine or giving your partner the flick. It’s an energy pricing strategy.

Energy utilities are run by profit-seeking business types who see energy conservation as fiscal sedition. Declining consumption leads to falling production which, ‘dum-de-dumdum’ [spooky music] causes falling profits and before you can say, “turn off that light will ya Shirl,” they’re not the mighty mega corporation it says in the glossy prospectus.

All this research work is aimed at finding a way to ‘decouple’ sales from profits. It’s price fixing by another name. The energy providers, especially in the private sector, say with a straight face that energy conservation is ‘unfair’ because it hurts their profits.

So much for the law of supply and demand, the survival of the fittest and all that blah about deregulation.

I think we’re going to see more and more, the sooky side of capitalism, where it threatens to take its marbles and go home if we don’t follow the rules.

But as your grandchildren may one day gasp, “Who did make the rules?”.