With all the concern over the Gulf oil spill catastrophe, I am surprised so few recognize the almost complete lack of progress since Jimmy Carter”s landmark speech about oil dependency in 1979. Sure, we have expanded production so we are not much more dependant than in 1979, and we have started to move toward different ways to harvest existing energy, but we as a nation could do so much more ? if we weren”t so “now” oriented and plain ol” cheap!
A major concern, seems to me, is that thinking is oriented mostly to the use of petroleum as a fuel ? a role that is not all that hard to overcome?rather than as a source of the petrochemicals and products that use oil as a raw material that cannot be overcome. Try living without plastics and tires for example. And we keep overlooking a source of raw materials that the United States produces more of than anyone else. Waste! There are many small firms with appropriate patents that are currently doing some “retrieval,” but our attitudes, some firms that feel they are a threat, and our cheapness that restrain much progress. Think of it. Tires, water, garbage, agricultural by products, and so on ? while we happily fill up landfills with the purpose of making the world perfectly spherical! Perhaps the major obstacle to progress is that the total job is one much too large for the small firms in the industry, and too long-range for the larger ones. But “reuse/reclaim/salvage” is necessary for our future.
Once upon a time, long ago, a country was fighting for its values and ideals. Perhaps survival was not threatened itself, but the costs of survival in resources, money and lives looked to be horrendous. The country needed to find some major advantage to end the fighting. At the same time there was a body of theory, neither well known or well understood, that was felt to have potential. The development was too risky and costly for private industry, already doing their best, so the government put together a massive effort to fund and enable the research to get the job done. The job was done, the effort was the Manhattan Project, and the “advantage” was the atomic bomb! I think we should initiate a similar effort to try and find ways to make use of all of the materials we waste.
Many of us really don”t like the idea of government intervention, “more” government, and further government funding, but I suspect another Manhattan Project is the only way it is going to get done. Probably would cost some, but what a legacy to pass on. “Paying it forward” is a marvelous and honorable thing!
Guthrie Worth
Lakeport
