Treating Oil Like a 19th Century Buffalo Herd

Are we acting like the old buffalo hunters in the late nineteenth century? I once heard it said that as the bison disappeared, hunters had three options – they could find better ways to hunt the remaining buffalo, they could find ways to nurture the herd back to health, or they could find things to hunt besides buffalo. What they could not do, but sadly chose to, was sit in saloons drinking while waiting for the herds to return.

Now it looks as though we are following the hunters’ path with regard to oil reserves. It’s as though we figure we can continue to party on in our Suburbans, Expeditions and Hummers while we wait for oil supplies to build back up and prices to come back down.

It could be a long wait.

That’s because our current oil prices are not so much a result of supply problems as they are of demand. We like to think that the war in Iraq has disrupted oil production, leading to higher prices, but that’s not the case. The real culprit lies in exploding demand in developing nations, particularly China. Save for a collapse of the Chinese economy, that dynamic is only going to get worse.

So what are our options? Let’s consider the buffalo hunters.

We can look for new sources of petroleum. That seems to be the primary answer sought by the Bush administration. While they have made some cursory comments regarding alternative solutions such as hydrogen-based fuel cells, their foremost strategy is to drill more wells.

That is a short-term solution at best. The fact is that petroleum is a finite resource. What we have is what we get. It took millions of years for plants and dinosaurs to decay and become liquid oil. In little more than a century, we’ve gone a long way toward depleting that supply. It may last a few more decades or a century at best, but then what? The time to act is before it’s gone.

That leads to solution number two. We can nurture the resource. That means conservation. Despite arguments that this is no more than a touchy-feely solution with little real value, it must be our first step. Conservation buys us time. Were it not for improvements in energy efficiency over the past thirty years, we’d currently be consuming as much as forty percent more oil than we are today.

I find it strange that we have stricter controls on how much water we can flush down a toilet than on how much gas our cars can burn. That must change – water simply goes back into the environment. Oil disappears forever.

The real answer, however, lies in solution number three – finding alternative energy sources. There is no shortage of energy, only petroleum. Of the options, hydrogen fuel cell technology is among the most intriguing. But we must consider all our energy options, including wind, water, solar, geothermal, and yes, nuclear.

The handwriting is on the wall. Or should I say it is on the pylon sign in front of the filling station. Those prices are rising because we are squeezing a precious, limited resource. They are not a sign of impending disaster, but of the need for aggressive out-of-the-box thinking. The time to act is now, lest we finish off the last of our oil like the delusional buffalo hunter down to his last drop of whiskey.