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Read the passage and answer the question.

Recently I spent several hours sitting under a tree in my garden with social anthropologist William Ury, a Harvard University professor who specializes in the art of negotiation and wrote the bestselling book, Getting to Yes. He captivated me with his theory that tribalism protects people from their fear of rapid change. He explained that the pillars of tribalism that humans rely on for security would always counter any significant cultural or social change. In this way, he said, change is never allowed to happen too fast. Technology, for example, is a pillar of society. Ury believed that every time technology moves in a new radical direction, another pillar such as religion or nationalism will grow stronger – in effect, that the traditional and familiar will assume greater importance to compensate for the new and untested. In this manner, human tribes avoid rapis change that leaves people insecure and frightened.

But we all have heard that nothing is as permanent as change. Nothing is guaranteed. Pithy expressions, to be sure, but no more than clichés. As Ury says, people don’t live that way from day-to-day. On the contrary, they actively seek certainly and stability. They want to know they will be safe.

Evert so, we scare ourselves constantly with the idea of change. An IBM CEO once said: “We only re-structure for a good reason, and if we haven’t re-structured in a while, that’s a good reason.’ We are scared that competitors, technology and the consumer will put us out of business – so we have to change all the time just to stay alive. But if we asked our fathers and grandfather, would they have said that they lived in a period of little change? Structure may not have changed much. It may just be the speed with which we do things.

Change is over-rated, anyway. Consider the automobile. It is an especially valuable, because the auto industry has spent tens of billions of dollars on research and productdevelopment in the last $100$ years. Henry Ford’s first car had a metal chassis with an internal combustion, gasoline-powered engine, four wheels with rubber tyres, a foot operated clutch assembly tat brake a system, a steering wheel, and four seats, and it could safely do $18$ miles per hour. A hundred years and tens of thousands of research hours later, we drive card with a metal chassis with an internal combustion, gasoline powered engine, four wheels with rubber tyres, a foot operated clutch assembly and brake system, a steering wheel, four seats – and the average speed in London in $2001$ was $17.5$ miles per hour!

That’s not a hell of a lot of return for the money. Ford evidently doesn’t have much to teach us about change. The fact that they’re still manufacturing cars is not proof that Ford Motor Co. is a sound organization, just proof that it takes very large companies to make cars in great quantities – making for an almost impregnable entry barrier. Fifty years after the development of the jet engine, planes are also little changed. They’ve grown bigger, wider and can carry more people. But those are incremental, largely cosmetic changes.

Taken together, this lack of real change has come to mean that in travel – whether driving or flying – time and technology have not combined to make things much better. The safely and design have of course accompanied the times and the new volume of cars and flights, but nothing of any significance changed in the basic assumptions of the final product.

At the same time, moving around in cars or aeroplanes becomes less and less efficient all the time. Not only has there been no great change, but also both forms of transport have deteriorated as more people clamour to use them. The same is true for telephones, which took over hundred years to become mobile, or photographic film, which also required an entire century to change.

The only explanation for this is anthropological. Once established in calcified organizations, humans do two things: sabotage changes that might render people dispensable, and ensure industry-wide emulation. In the $1960$’s German auto companies developed plans to scrap the entire combustion engine for an electrical design. (The same existed in the $1970$s in Japan; and in the $1980$s in France.) So for $40$ years we might have been free of the wasteful and ludicrous dependence on fossil fuels. Why didn’t it go anywhere? because auto executives understood piston and carburetors, and would be loath to cannibalize their expertise, along with most of their factories.

According to the passage, the reason why we continued to be dependent on fossil fuels is that:

  1. Auto executives did not wish to change.
  2. No alternative fuels were discovered.
  3. Change in technology was not easily possible.
  4. German, Japanese and French companies could not come up with new technologies.
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