Our Mid-oil Crisis

We are finite. We know at some point we will run out of time. But when we are young, we act like we will live forever, and we do things we may regret later. Half way through life, we start to realize our limitations. We may look back disappointed with the time we’ve wasted and look forward anxious to make the remaining time meaningful. Some of us emerge with sports cars or mistresses, others with renewed purpose and new possibilities.

On this planet, our oil supply is finite. So far we’ve been using it like teenagers, like we will have oil forever. But we are slowly realizing we might be half way through it, and we are starting to regret the pollution and global warming our oil burning is causing. Looking back we accomplished a lot with oil, from powering our economic growth to making plastics that have transformed our way of life. Looking forward we see a need to find substitutes that don’t burden the planet. There are some who are ready to take on this challenge and others who don’t think we should just yet.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 23, 2007, Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a venture capitalist, called to unleash our entrepreneurs and researchers to develop biofuels. He asserted that if we set policies to build a market for alternatives to oil, in ten years we can transform how we use and fundamentally think about energy. He is so clear and committed to this possibility, he’s bet on it with his own time and money.

In another Wall Street Journal op-ed published on January 18, 2007, Flemming Rose and Bjorn Lomborg challenged Al Gore to a verbal duel over how to handle global warming. They did not deny its existence, or its anthropogenic sources. Instead they disputed some of the facts Al Gore uses in his message, ultimately concluding that the impacts of global warming do not justify the investment to fight it. They argued, “we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world."

Energy is integral to most everything we do; it is vital to our way of life. In the US, oil accounts for 40% of our total energy consumption, which is sobering when you consider we may have already used half of world’s supply. We are at a turning point. We can choose to buy that sports car and push the snooze button as Rose and Lomborg suggest, or we can choose to embrace the possibility of a new energy platform that will take us further than the remaining oil we have could.

Sources:
Wall Street Journal Thursday, January 18, 2007, page A16 "Will Al Gore Melt?"
Wall Street Journal Tuesday, January 23, 2007, page A18 "The War on Oil"
EIA Petroleum Products Information Sheet