It's just a phase we're going through...

Saw an article in the newspaper the other day about how we are running out of helium. My sympathy to Simon, Theodore and Alvin. The funny thing was, as I read the surprisingly lengthy article, I could see where you could easily cross out “helium” and pencil in “oil” and the article would be just as valid. It’s always seemed odd to me that the fact that we are running out of oil has never really been big news. No idea why. You’d think it would. It should.

The thing is, what was being said about helium, and what could be said about oil, could also be said about every non-renewable natural resource on, or in, earth. With seven billion people milling around on the big blue marble, we are using up stuff like mad. So yeah, a lot of it is going to run out. Not just the oil and helium.

Richard Heinberg did his very best to warn us with his book, Peak Everything (New Society Publishers, 2010). Obviously, Mister Heinberg is not one to beat around the bush. Rather than try to list everything that we risk using up without replacement, it might be easier to list the stuff we won’t run out of. Let’s see… I’ve got that short list here somewhere… on a very small piece of paper. Ah, here we go:

Solar power, wind power, and, um, yeah, well, I told you it’s a short list. There are many things we do and use now that we will always be able to do to some degree, but maybe not to the huge degree we do now. Like travel. Like farming. Once we use up all of the natural non-renewable resources, human enterprise will sort of stumble into its next phase: The “re-use it or lose it” phase. We are currently wrapping up the “we got it all!” phase, having managed to drag ourselves out of the “hunter-gatherer” phase awhile back. Don’t worry, it’s just a phase we’re going through.

With few exceptions, earth’s natural resources are a sort of use-once proposition. Oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, helium, you name it, you use it- but only one time. After that, it’s gone forever. We do have some stuff we can reuse, like water. And we can plant more crops to grow more food, but with less help from oil, et cetera, we’ll get less food with every round. We are running headlong into an era of less, even as we demand more. It’s going to be an epic train wreck. Assuming we’ll still have fuel for the train. (Okay, so maybe it won’t be a train wreck. Maybe the train will simply roll to a silent halt.)

There’s really no way for you to truly prepare for this sort of thing. We will deplete our natural resources over the years, decades and centuries. But we already see it begin. We are about out of helium. The Chipmunks will finally reach puberty. Oil will get iffy and the ten thousand other things we extract from the earth will be a little less plentiful every year. Little by little, over time, we will be nibbled to death by ducks.

But hey, did we have some fun there for awhile or WHAT?!

Conservation: the next big thing!

From time to time, when people talk about the oil crisis we face, and the need for a viable alternative energy resource, the idea is put forth that all we have to do is go at it as we did putting a man on the moon. We did that in less than a decade, so why not this?

Here’s why not: There aren’t too many blank spots left on the periodic table of the elements. We’ve found all the obvious stuff here on earth, and these days, if some scientist does manage to find something new to add, it’s invariably something like “garbanzobeanium” and it’s really rare. There’s simply nothing left to discover around here that will do all for us that oil has done for us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t all work together to solve the problem. There is a solution, you just won’t like it. Oh, and the US space program is pretty much wrapped up, too. Time to move on.

I must have been out the day “conservation” became a dirty word in America. It became un-American, and maybe just a little bit pink-o. Too bad, ‘cause that’s what’s gonna save us. The big “Moon Landing/Manhattan Project” response to the oil crisis is for us to go after conservation like there’s no tomorrow. Because if we don’t, there isn’t.

Since we do so very little conservation here in America right now, this is a wide open field of possibilities. We are such energy pigs. Where to begin? At home, we need to set goals for energy and resource consumption. What if we said everyone had to limit their home energy use to 5 kwh a day and 750 gallons of water a month, per person? First off, you’d have to figure out how much you are using now to see how little that is. But could you do it? Could you use that little? That ain’t much, but it’s also what the Lovely JoAnn and I use together in our house, so it can be done. I dare you to even take the time to figure out what you use at home, either per person or in total. You will be amazed.

We drive about 10,000 miles a year, and yes, we could reduce that, if and when we have to. We are not extravagant drivers, and again, that figure is for both of us together - about 5,000 miles per person per year. Put like that, it ain’t so bad. But what about you? There’s no doubt that the oil crisis will hit our driving habits hard - and first. How much could you conserve there? Time to start looking.

Of course, for any national conservation effort to work, the public has to be given a very good reason to make the sacrifice. It has to be a sort of Patriotic War Effort thing, and there are far too few people left around here who remember the last one. Still, we did it then, and we can do it again - if we are shown that we have to. I’ve always said that Americans are lousy about planning ahead, but great when it comes to responding to a crisis. And this will be all that.

So maybe now’s the time to buck the trend and look at your life in terms of future conservation potential. How much could you save, how much less would you need to use, if you absolutely had to? Eventually you will, National Conservation Effort or not. Conservation needs to be our next Big Thing.