Wake up before it's too late: A commentary on the energy crisis

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Wake up before it's too late A commentary on the energy crisis

By Frank McCulloch, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 12:29 PM ET Jan 17, 2001 NewsWatch Latest headlines Get Alerted

Editor's Note: Frank McCulloch has covered California for decades at the Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee, and most recently as managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner until his retirement in 1992. During the Vietnam War he led coverage in Southeast Asia for Time-Life. He is a member of the CBS.MarketWatch.com advisory board.

The California power crisis doesn't seem all that difficult to me.

All we have to do is generate more power, then buy it and sell it at lower prices. That done, Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG: news, msgs) won't have to fire any more employees or risk bankruptcy. And the rest of us won't have to turn off our lights, computers or electric guitars.

Hey, I'm not naïve. I know there are some problems attached to my solution. For example, before we can generate more power someone has to go out and grub around and find more gas, coal or falling water, and maybe all three. Or someone must discover some kind of benign nuclear gizmo.

I also acknowledge that all that prospecting can create its own problems, the first of which is that with the possible exception of nukes, all that stuff is pretty hard to find. Should we set out on our own looking for them, we'll probably discover that someone else got there first and already has a hammerlock on those resources.

It's also sadly true that before we deliver out first erg, or whatever the term for the minutest measure of power might be, we will have to pass through uncounted years of battling and political caterwauling. It's going to be tough, believe me, deciding how to divide up all these new riches without stepping on too many toes, including those of the three-toed sloth.

Dawning comprehension

I hate to go on this way, but still another problem looms. It, I think, belongs under the title of dawning comprehension. Simply stated, it rests on the increasingly unavoidable conclusion that, like it or not, all resources are finite. What that means, of course, is that some day they'll all be gone, maybe one at a time, maybe, like the wonderful one-hoss shay, all at once and nothing first.

The reason for this is that the earth itself is finite, a hard concept to grasp but also unavoidable. It might help to visualize it as an orange. When we have sucked all the juice out of it and eaten all the flesh, that orange is worthless, and nothing Humpty Dumpty can do will put it back together again. You can always go out and buy another orange, of course, but new earths are harder to come by.

Truth to tell, there's another big problem out there, and it's created by the world's soaring human population. Every time we snuff out another species, it seems, we gain a billion or so humans to compensate. You can look at it as a problem in long division: an ever-increasing number of people being divided into an ever-shrinking store of resources.

Back when the population was, say, one billion and resources were much closer to being in balance with demand, the long division came out okay. But as the population swells to two billion, four billion, six billion and beyond, the divisor grows and the dividend shrinks. Unless you love answers in fractions, that's hard to sustain. Which is a euphemistic way of saying life will become a good deal less pleasant, and that's another euphemism.

Daunting options

Well, you sensibly ask, what about population controls? Fine, although some questions arise: Who will impose them? Upon whom? And how do you do that?

Enforced conservation? Same questions, same unsatisfactory answers.

So what about new technologies? Let us hope they continue to emerge. But the practical application of them to most human life requires the consumption of those hard-pressed natural resources. In other words, sooner or later, the two are interdependent.

Colonization of other heavenly bodies? Great. Go for it. But it's hard to believe that the creation of small and scattered human colonies out here in space will have much impact on the billions and billions still back here on earth. Who, incidentally, may be so hungry, frightened, thirsty and confused they won't have much interest in the finiteness of resources or space travel.

And what about the water?

Speaking of thirsty, let us remember that water, at least clean and useful water, is one of the most important resources. We're not doing too well with that either. Unless present trends in pollution, overfishing and other abuses are reversed, our oceans will be barren, a catastrophic event that may be closer that we hope.

Fresh water, the water we drink, bathe in and water our lawns with, is already in perilously short supply in parts of the world. Wars have already been fought over its control, and a plausible scenario suggests that bigger ones could lie ahead. Unless you've lived in such a situation, it's hard to understand what people will do to avoid being thirsty. Conversion of seawater is one idea. But the more polluted it gets, the harder that is to do. Moreover, the conversion process requires the investment of other natural resources, and we're already worried about those.

Let's go back now to the California power crisis. Perhaps it's only a blip on history's scorecard, soon to be fixed and forgotten.

But maybe not. Maybe it's the first step down that long, rocky road to the point at which the long division no longer works. Or maybe it's the first sharp beep from the distant early warning line.

Yo, you movers and shakers and policy makers.

Did you hear that?

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/20010117/news/current/mcculloch.htx?source=htx/http2_mw

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 17, 2001

Answers

WWW.dieoff.com

-- Lee Blocher (cblocher@northernway.net), January 17, 2001.

Also http://www.sprawlcity.com/

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), January 18, 2001.

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