Awash In Oil

In what are ostensibly low-energy intensive affairs (running, bicycling, and kayaking), my participation in yesterday's Eppie's Great Race was anything but -- my triathlon was awash in fossil fuels.

I figure for my three + hours during the race I burned an estimated 2,170 calories...but we had to drive to the start point the night before to pick up the race packet, drive to check out where to drop off the bike and kayak, drive home, drive back in the morning to drop off the stuff, drive again to pick it up, and drive home...in a truck. We probably burned seven gallons of gas. At 31,000 calories per gallon, the truck burned 217,000 fossil fuel calories -- one hundred times as many as I did.

I lied a little about that 2,170 calorie figure; I didn't really burn that much...it just fit well with one hundredth of what my truck burned. But my point is still valid.

In any event, multiply this by the 2,100 participants, by the number of these sorts of events held around the nation, and the recreational use of oil is staggering.

While I attempt to reduce my overall energy consumption, I really haven't made any strides in reducing my recreational use of energy. I still burn as much as ever flying to Europe for holiday, driving to the bay area for concerts, driving to Oregon or Colorado to visit relatives, or running a triathlon. Here on my monologues I decry the very specific use of energy for commuting and our living arrangements that mandate automobile use...but as it applies to my own use to recreate, I burn as much as I damn well please. That certainly seems highly hypocritical, yes?

It's a paradox that's easy to rectify. Just don't go anywhere or do anything...or do them less often; but that's not about to happen. It is for this reason that I and the remaining three hundred million of us will continue to import ever larger percentages of foreign oil until there isn't any left to import, and until there isn't any left to domestically develop.

The difference with recreation use is that a rising price signal will curtail this use first, but we'll have no option but to continue to shuttle ourselves into and out of our Elk Grovian suburban bunkers. Our living arrangement mandates imported oil, period, no matter how much we might think we're gonna offset it with batterized Ford trucks, windmills in every backyard and algae-based diesel burning farm equipment growing ever larger amounts of corn and soybeans. It is for this reason I still think I've got an argument. If we didn't build out Elk Grove into such an automobile dominated shithole our residents might be able to recreate somewhat more often without having to work twelve years of their lives just to pay for their cars and all the energy used to get them around.

I will continue to recreationally use oil for as long as I live, as my costs associated with it are offset by my savings in not using as much oil to power the other areas of my life, and more importantly, my own overall energy use is still far below the U.S. average.

That's good enough for me.