Mother Nature's Savings Account

Fossil fuels can be looked at as Mother Nature's savings account. For a period of time, sunlight that fell on earth was incompletely "spent" leaving some stored in the form of hydrocarbons. We learned how to burn these compounds for heat (just like we did with wood, peat and dung) and eventually we learned how to convert their stored energy into mechanical force. Recently we've learned how to convert them into plastics and chemical fertilizers.

Basically, we found the passbook to this savings account and in our naivete we went on a spending spree. We've been spending coal on a massive scale for 200 years, oil on an even worse scale for a century. In the 1970s folks started thinking about oil as a finite resource, one we could conceivably run out of. We failed to actually do much though, and we failed to realize that the waste products of this spending spree could drown us (sort of like the way yeast drowns in its own waste [Etoh] at a concentration of around 14% - great for us, not so much for the yeast).

We've been able to wrest food from the soil on a truly miraculous scale, by using oil to push tractors, and by using fertilizers made from natural gas. We've been able to build up the world population from 1.5 billion to 6 billion souls. But this has been made possible only by raiding this savings account.

Living off your savings is not sustainable. Spending more than you make is not sustainable (yes, I realize that in a society, some folks can get away with just that, but they are, by definition, parasites, and a society can afford only so many parasites). We can only live off Mother Nature's savings for so long.

I guess that this perspective makes me an economic conservative. I believe in balance because I do not see any long range alternative. None. Ever. Inputs and outputs must eventually balance. All of our inputs here come directly or indirectly from the sun (although an argument can be made for nuclear [pronounced new-klee-are] fuels being the "savings account" of a former star and therefore not to be included in this balance sheet). Solar energy is direct, using sunlight to grow oilseed and processing the oilseed into biodiesel is indirect, but the parent energy is still solar.

We don't have deficit spending as an option. Money is a fiction that exists as "valuable" only because we all agree that it does. Energy is real: it either exists or it doesn't, it has finite quantity. There is no fuel to "borrow" against an expected better future.

What we do have is a miracle of history, and an opportunity that is very, very short. If we solve our energy supply problems in a totally sustainable way while we still have a mechanical infrastructure we can continue, probably not in the style to which we have become accustomed, but at least continue in a civilized and reasonably comfortable manner. If we blow it and let individual greed (the problem of the commons) rule our decision making, and this opportunity slips away, we are doomed. (Whoa, Dude, Doomed?)

The middle ages, referred to as "the Dark ages" for a reason, follwed the Roman Empire, yet its citizens knew very little of advanced Roman technologies. They lost the ability to accomplish a number of things once common. I only mention this to prove that it can and does happen. We need advanced materails technology to pull off a conversion to sustainable solar harvesting.

We need top take advantage of the understandings that we have earned. We need the materials technology that we've recently developed. I, as an individual, can go back to burning wood to stay warm and raisning my food and fuel on my small acreage. 6 billion of us can't all do that.