A year ago I turned on C-SPAN and found myself transfixed
for an hour by Roscoe Bartlett, the octogenarian congressman/engineer from Western Maryland who has made a cause out of lecturing Americans
about their dependence on petroleum. Well it happened again the other day — I turned on the TV and
another of his speeches on energy. This
one was a little more philosophical, I will summarize its major points.
The age
of oil, Bartlett said, will last 300 years. We’re halfway
through now, and on the downward slope. Those first 150 years transformed human history. Mankind had always
looked for energy sources that would replace the unending toil required to produce food and shelter and thus free men to
pursue more thoughtful activities. The
industrialization of the West had been facilitated by the discovery of coal; human
ingenuity took a great leap forward, and so did human population numbers. The extraction of oil made that curve a lot steeper. With one barrel
of oil,
tremendous advances in civilization, and helped set off a population explosion.
If
mankind were provident, Bartlett said, we would’ve recognized long ago that oil is a limited resource that should be husbanded as we looked to find other renewable energy sources. But mankind is not provident; and
responded to this gold mine like a kid finding a cookie jar, or a hog finding
the feed store door open. We’ve pigged
out. And now that we’ve realized we’re
in trouble, we’re responding sluggishly. Ethanol is a chimera, hydro and wind can replace just a few percent of
our habit, and no one has gotten their minds around nukes.
Bartlett,
his knuckles knobby with age, is worried about his many children and
grandchildren. The plain thrust of his
comments is that human beings are so spoiled by oil that when the godsend dries
up, there will be massive civil unrest, wars, and breakdown.
was poetic. We’re weak animals, he
said. Our sense of smell is pathetic
next to dogs, and theirs is pathetic alongside the silkworm moth, which can
detect its mate 6 miles away. Other
primates are much smaller than us, and much stronger. We have brains; we just have to use them.
Two comments. We all know that Third World countries rape natural resources. The
Africans and Chinese poach rare creatures for a body part, the Brazilians turn
the rainforest into chip board. We’re
appalled; but it’s not like we’re setting a different example. Then there’s
slavery and oil. Bartlett says that as weak human beings sought to magnify their energies, and free themselves for leisure and art, their first answer was to
enslave other human beings. But Christianity said that slavery was immoral, and
when it spread it ended the practice in many places, resulting,
It is interesting to think of our
dependence on oil in similar terms. We are enslaved in our own way, and
destroying the planet into the bargain. Can a new kind of religious understanding transform our priorities, and cause us to make material sacrifices?
