Off By One

Every once in a while it strikes me (harder) that more needs to be put into realistic alternatives to the dependence that we’ve fostered on fossil fuels.

This isn’t a new thing to many of my readers, most of whom swing more to the left than I do, with commesurate (Matt, want to confirm my spelling on that?) views on environmental issues. It’s not really new to me, either, although I lack the knee-jerk anti-corporate reaction to massive oil companies.

What I do have is a strong distaste for short-sightedness and waste.

The latter is the the easiest make that hardest to address. Waste is hard to define simply because we don’t have an absolute scale against which to measure it. Is fossil fuel use really being wasteful? In and of itself, that is? I’ll acknowledge that there are uses to which it is put that are, but not that it’s a waste in toto. How about the idea of a space elevator? Is that a waste?

The former is clearer. Little research is done into alternate energy sources, relative to the amount that goes into squeezing yet more oil from the ground. And, really, what’s their motivations? It’s clear that there’s more money to be made selling oil than there is to be made spending it on research into ways to make oil obsolete. That’s the shortsightedness I was talking about.

All one can really hope is that high oil prices and the increased cost to consumers drive the adoption of alternatives to oil.