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?!
