My Wasteline

We've got around 1,000 barrels a day leaking from what's left from the Deepwater Horizon explosion last week, leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know if that's a big number. It's presumably leaking from the seabed, some 1,500 meters down. I dunno, seems to me that the ocean could easily absorb this leak, seeing how it's a mile underwater, the Gulf contains 560,000 cubic miles of water and 1,000 barrels is maybe five swimming pools.

This one rig alone highlights what we have to do to get oil these days; drilling through a mile of water, followed by a mile or three of rock with a $600,000,000 rig, all so I can blog using my oil-derived plastic keyboard; so I can burn it up on my motorcycle going 75 down my residential street at 1:33 AM; so I can fill the local landfill with broken Chinese-made plastic housewares and free plastic pens I receive while filling out forms at the insurance broker's office.

By the way, the drilling rig was manufactured by Hyundai Heavy Industries, the same South Korean outfit manufacturing most of SMUDs bulk transformers. All those well paid welders, shop forewomen, design engineers, process control managers...all of them lost from the U.S., lost overseas. Today the only jobs available are all those hot dog vendors in all those little hot dog kiosks outside all our Home Depots across America. No shortage of those high quality jobs, eh?

Let me consider an analogy for a moment. No one currently alive has ever seen a passenger pigeon, the last one dying in 1914. I wonder what it might have been like to see black clouds of hundreds of thousands of these birds overhead. I also wonder: what will people living in the year 2110 and 2210 think of our indiscriminate use of the one time allotment of petroleum humankind has been given? They most surely will have developed their own energy alternatives, yes, but they will still be drilling and will still be accessing petroleum, although at much, much smaller flow rates. It will be a prized commodity, unlike today, where even the lowest paid schlub only needs to work twenty-three minutes at her theater attendant job to buy a gallon of refined crude that contains as much energy as she can produce with 520 hours of hard physical labor. Future peoples will wonder how earlier generations were allowed to burn it up solo-commuting from Elk Grove to Pleasanton, from Hamilton to Dayton, every day, much like I wonder how earlier generations were allowed to kill 50,000 passenger pigeons every day for five straight months in 1878 in Petoskey, Michigan, the site of one of the passenger pigeon's last nesting areas.

We presume that the loss of the passenger pigeon means absolutely nothing to our existence today. I'd be floored if even 7% of our Elk Grovian populace have ever even heard of this bird. The future extinction of the lowland gorilla and bonobo will equally resonate quietly with Elk Grovains, too, as they will be much too busy fighting traffic in their electric cars to concern themselves with the goings-on in the natural world.

This is a tragic condition. I was never one to concern myself with my indiscriminate use of natural resources for many years, either; I never had to. I never understood what it meant to not have them as I've always had them, and in such copious quantities that it meant nothing to waste them. It's tragic that I was never educated about this, that these resources were valued just below my waste-line.

The year after I was born, the U.S. began its inexorable decline in domestic oil production and every year since we've produced less than the year before -- regardless of Deepwater Horizon technology and regardless of how many giant fields we discover. I believe that in my lifetime we will finally begin to realize the value of what we wasted.

Just like a modern depression that will likely never happen, likewise I will never see a true resource shortage in my lifetime. While I might want to see both, particularly for the societal changes that would inevitably occur, I will likely not see either in my lifetime. I have no true interest in living through a depression; however, I do maintain that living in a post-depression America would be better -- where people give a shit about where they live, where people care about their neighbors, where we build better social living arrangements and networks. It has been written, extensively, that our zenith occured in 1958 -- post war/post depression, but before the advent of cheap foreign consumables, before we fuckered away our manufacturing base, before all our discretionary wars for freedom. I didn't live in that era, but I presume many considered it our culture's peak because the generation before it suffered extensively and understood what it was like not to have.