The Poet's Eye 
        commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgmental

 

Energy or Ingenuity?
for release on 11-11-04

Empires are based on the control of commodities. In the time of Rome, the commodities were wheat and slaves. During the time that Brittania ruled the seas, the commodities were raw industrial materials, shipping and slaves. With the industrial Revolution we got steel and steam and factories. Technology had become a commodity. Then came oil.

Burning things for fuel was nothing new in 1900, when Anthony Lucas drilled Spindletop. Men had been burning things for energy ever since Prometheus delivered fire. First it was grass and dung and fallen sticks and twigs. Then the trees themselves. Most of Northern Europe was deforested for firewood and charcoal. Then there was the coal that had to be mined with raw human misery and then transported and then it belched out mountains of black smoke. Compared to coal, oil was clean and easy. With a three man crew, an oil driller could mine more energy in a day than a whole town of coal diggers. Then came the automobile.

The oil and the automobile industries have shaped the world in which we live today. It's a nice world, if you live in a modern industrialized city. There is ample food and comfort. We have air conditioning and transportation because of oil. It provides our electricity. The roads that bring the produce to our cities are built of oil and the trucks that haul the bounty are powered by oil and the water we use to grow the crops is sucked from the ground with oil powered pumps.

The modern industrial empires run on oil and oil is running out. And they all know it. That's why we can look forward to more imperial wars launched to secure control of this prime commodity.

Oil is the very blood in the veins of our modern industrial world. The problem is, that we have become hopelessly addicted to it and supplies of it are finite. When I was a teenager in West Texas during the 1960's, my step-father was a petroleum geologist. Our family's living depended upon the price of oil, so I knew what it was: $3.30 per barrel. You could buy gas for twenty cents a gallon. Now oil is hovering around fifty dollars per barrel.

I know that the dollar is not what it used to be. But supply and demand are at work here, as well as inflation. As the industrial world develops, the demand for oil increases while the production capacity maintains and the supplies diminish. Where there once were bicycles and rickshaws on the streets of Beijing and Singapore, there are now cars and motorcycles. Sooner or later the squeeze is going to come. By all cogent reckoning it will occur in the next thirty to fifty years. I can only imagine the gas lines that my grandkids will have to endure.

Unless we do something now, SUV Nation will be in a sad situation by the next generation. I know that sounds like a rap song, but it's true. If we don't pay more than lip service to developing alternative energy sources we are going to find ourselves stranded on the side of the road in our big fat Ford Expeditions. The Hummers will not be humming a pleasant tune.

I was a junky for twenty years and I know from experience that the last thing a junky wants to do is surrender his dope. This is the situation that America and the world face today. We are strung out, tight as a banjo string, on oil. We need it to maintain our comfort level. It would be easy if you could grow oil like you can grow the opium poppy. The more junkies there are, the more acres you plant. But you can't grow oil. We are going to have to change our addiction.

I think we can do this without having a national AA meeting. We can wean ourselves off gradually. It has already been proved that you can fly in an ultralight airplane coast to coast powered by alcohol that was manufactured from grass cuttings on the side of the highway. We are harnessing free wind power in the California hills and free sun power in the Arizona desert. High school kids in the 1970's built a hydrogen powered car, working with almost no budget. Even so, the big auto companies say that it will take another 10 years to develop such a vehicle. They figure that they have time. And besides they haven't finished milking the previous cow. There is no shortage of energy. This is the Universe, my friends. It is made of energy. What we have here is a shortage of ingenuity.

Last year, another group of high school students in Arizona built a car that runs on water and sunlight and makes the air cleaner with its exhaust. And the auto/petro companies say it will take more years of study before they can figure out how to produce a hydrogen car even though they have major budgets and supposedly the best engineers in the world. You would think that the elite of science and industry would be embarrassed to be upstaged by a bunch of high school kids. Maybe they are. Perhaps that's why they would prefer to equip our young people with bibles, guns and flack jackets rather than with comprehensive science textbooks.

The possibilities of hydrogen fuel cell technology are immense. The only problem is that American industry is so entrenched in the oil/dope trade, and getting so fat by dealing petro-junk that they don't want to get off the gravy train. The bottom line will still be good for another twenty or thirty years until the oil runs out. By then they will have made enough money so that their families will be comfortable for generations. The chemo-petro-military complex has spent millions to purchase our government. because they know that this bunch will not hesitate to spend the youth of our country to impound the worlds remaining supplies of oil. Why should they press for change?

The Poet's Eye sees that we would do much better if we encouraged our young men and women to devise new ways to solve our energy problems instead of putting guns in their hands and sending them off to steal for our oil fix. But as long as you are getting your dope from the pusher, you will dance to the pusher's tune. Get a car that runs on good intentions. Or buy a bicycle.

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