There is an elephant in the room which no one seems to be addressing.

And that is that fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource. New deposits (which is to say, deposits that have been there for millions of years, but have just recently been discovered) are getting much more difficult to find. When it's gone, it's gone! What do we do then?

In the meantime—I recall a conversation I had back in the early 1960s. The conversation was with Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction writer, who was living in Seattle at the time. This was while he was going for advanced degrees at the University of Washington and working in the aero-space division of the Boeing Airplane Company, and before he moved to California and—among other things—started writing science fiction.

Jerry was talking about the egregious wasting of fossil fuels. He held up a ball-point pen and said, "When you consider the number of things that are made out of petroleum—the barrel of this pen, for example—AND such things as medicines, fertilizers" (and he recited a long list of things that people use all the time, but have no idea are actually petroleum products, and some of which are essential to some peoples' lives) "it is a crime against future generations to simply burn it to produce energy!"

He then went on to list a number of renewable sources of energy that are not being utilized, such as solar, wind, tidal, and he outlined a couple that sounded pretty far out, but which, he assured me, would not just work, but would work more inexpensively than fossil fuels. "And," he went on, "would not stink up the atmosphere!"

Jerry was (is) politically pretty conservative (he served as one of Ronald Reagan's science advisors and was an advocate of Star Wars, even designing a number of weapons systems for it), but he was right on the money when it came to being concerned about what humans were doing to the planet—and where it could eventually lead.

What do we do when the fossil fuels run out? Worry about it then!??

Don Firth