Here's a good article from one of my favorite radio talk show hosts....
Existential (Energy) Crisis
Because we are human, we are capable of infinite creativity and invention.
nationalreview.com
By Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, a national coalition of Jews and Christians, and the author, most recently, of Buried Treasure: Secrets for Living from the Lord's Language (Multnomah).
June 11, 2001 9:10 a.m.
The energy crisis, with its epicenter in West, will likely have very real consequences this summer, not least when Californians find they can't keep their homes properly air-conditioned. Personally, though, I'm interested in it as a metaphysical event. Here in Washington as well as in other western states, there are those who understand the crisis not as a practical challenge, a temporary annoyance brought on by inept politicians, but almost as an existential condition that has descended upon America.
Take Judy, a bright and successful Seattle business professional I met recently at a dinner party. Over coffee, she announced that she welcomes higher electricity prices since that's just the incentive she needs to cut down her power usage. Skeptically, I asked if this was perhaps an instance of mixing up cause and effect. Judy wasn't going to dim the lights to reduce her electricity bills. Instead she wanted higher bills to make her dim the lights.
No, she explained, there was no mix-up. "Haven't you heard about the energy shortage?" she asked. "It's wrong to use more than your fair share!"
Now, Judy wears three-hundred-dollar sweaters. For her, this wasn't about the money. Existential conditions call for responses that are philosophical, spiritual, and moral. And what she was talking about was just that: morality, doing the right thing, not the economical thing.
I told her not to worry, for Judy's existential energy shortage is less real than imagined. If you don't believe me, let's recall some American history.
Until the early 18th century, colonial homes were heated by burning wood. Meanwhile, the rapidly growing colonies were running out of forests. Was it an energy shortage? No, just time for a transition from one energy source to another.
So the colonists began burning coal imported from England. In 1745, the first American coal mine was excavated in Virginia. Ever since the 13th century, dark rumors about the stuff abounded. Word came from France that burning coal caused "strange and serious epidemics of disease." There were indeed dangers; but soon these were overcome and by 1840 America was deriving energy from a million tons of coal a year.
But the specter of an energy shortage surfaced again. In 1865, William Jevons, later a renowned economist at University College, London, inaugurated his career with a paper entitled, "The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines." In it he predicted that British prosperity would end within fifty years when the nation ran out of coal. To conserve what coal was left, he called for an industrial slowdown. Today Britain is still mining coal, with no end in sight.
But coal can't be used to light your home. For that, America depended on whale oil. During the early 19th century, pundits warned that since whales were being harvested at an ever-increasing rate, America would soon go dark. To conserve what whale oil was left, they recommended turning out all lights each evening no later than ten o'clock.
The pundits were wrong about America going dark. In 1859 a railroad conductor called Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pa., and the age of petroleum had begun. Since the 1970s we have heard much about the imminent threat of our exhausting the world's petroleum reserves. It hasn't happened yet.
In short, energy can be produced indefinitely so long as human ingenuity is allowed to keep up with demand. Any such perceived shortage is simply a practical problem to which man's creativity will, if permitted, find a solution.
Yet as Judy intuited, we are indeed confronted here with an existential condition; it's just a different condition from the one she thought. It has to do with the fact that we are human, not animals.
Animals don't need external sources of energy. They hunt and gather, always expending less energy in the quest than they gain from consuming the quarry. Precisely because we are not animals, we yearn to liberate ourselves from drudgery and thus free ourselves for higher moral purposes, which means we do need external energy sources. Fortunately, also because we are human, we are capable of infinite creativity and invention.
This is the lesson of history, and the reason we need not fear any permanent energy shortage. Human ingenuity carried us from firewood to coal, from whale oil to petroleum. And human ingenuity will carry us to the next stage of energy evolution.
In this process we have learned how to extract ever more energy from each pound of matter. Now we have nuclear power, a process, albeit controversial, that releases almost infinite amounts of energy. We are familiar with the fears of "strange and serious epidemics of disease" from nuclear power. But if history is any guide, those problems will be overcome.
When that happens, and I think it must, perhaps the well-intentioned and well-heeled, like my friend Judy, will no longer seek their moral purpose by conserving energy. They will be able to find meaning in life in other ways, while they purchase energy just as they do coffee and clothing: by consulting their budget, not their conscience. |
