¶ Cosmic Accounting Sequence (3)
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Index Entry
Cosmic Accounting Sequence:
"and pressure and heat to make a gallon of petroleum. And he came out with the figure that it costs about a million dollars to make a gallon of petroleum.
"And I maid to David /Rockefeller/, anybody ought to be able to sell a million dollars for fifty cents.
“And he got his geologists to check and he found out that it’s the correct magnitude, all right. . . But I said then that when you give up the idea that you’ve got to earn a living-- and so we spend three million dollars a day to get 50 dollars-- it doesn’t make much sense. And that’s the kind of nonsense I began to run into when I got into this cosmic costing. Now I see then that the Universe is really trying to build up a savings account here. And we are operating at very low efficiency. If we really were doing well with that energy, we might just justify it for the moment on the basis that it could do better. Society is obviously… and human beings are invented the way they are and they have to find their way and they have to learn by trial and error and they have to make a lot of mistakes. We have a very big cushion-- by trial and error-- to do things.”
¶ Citations
- RBF to Harvey Kapnick, Chmn., of Arthur Anderson & co., New York, NY, (p.3 of transcript), 13 Mar’74
