Did you go to the gas station to fill your tank today? Were you amazed that the station had gasoline? No? Took it for granted? Hmmm.
In 1922 the United States Geological Survey estimated that the country would run out of oil by 1942. Just wouldn’t be any more of the stuff in the ground. After all, Americans had been drilling for and extracting petroleum since Col. Drake dug that first well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. Couldn’t be much left, could there?
Nevertheless, there you were today, standing at the gas pump, pumping away with nary a thought except about its cost. Yep. The stuff just comes out of the pump whenever you want. How could the Geological Survey have been so wrong?
It wasn’t just oil. Coal and natural gas would be gone also according to those making the estimates. Again, how could those guys have missed the mark? And missed it by a bunch of years? They could not even have comprehended in 1922 that more than 250 million vehicles would burn oil as gasoline in the United States alone this year. Obviously, that 1922 projection of a twenty-year supply was way off.
Predicting is a chancy business for people locked in the present. New technologies make yesterday’s predictions seem naïve. Yet, regardless of the lessons of the past, that there’s much for us to discover just as we discovered many new reserves of oil, we keep making dire predictions.
Will we, as the Geological Survey once predicted, run out of oil? Probably. We do live on a finite planet. Everyone can guess that we can’t keep eating a cake and still have that cake. But interestingly, we seem to have found ways to discover new oil reserves while changes in technologies have allowed us to acquire energy from sources the Geological Survey would not have known in 1922. True, you can’t eat a cake and still have that cake, but you can eat a cake and have a different one, even in a finite world.
Dire predictions seem to have been with us since before the augurs told Caesar to beware the Ides of March. But through the centuries there have been some who never stopped discovering. We could take this fact as a personal lesson. Do I have to tell you? Okay. The next time someone says you can’t do something, that you won’t have the resources, take that person to the gas station and let him or her watch you fill up your tank.
In 1922 the United States Geological Survey estimated that the country would run out of oil by 1942. Just wouldn’t be any more of the stuff in the ground. After all, Americans had been drilling for and extracting petroleum since Col. Drake dug that first well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. Couldn’t be much left, could there?
Nevertheless, there you were today, standing at the gas pump, pumping away with nary a thought except about its cost. Yep. The stuff just comes out of the pump whenever you want. How could the Geological Survey have been so wrong?
It wasn’t just oil. Coal and natural gas would be gone also according to those making the estimates. Again, how could those guys have missed the mark? And missed it by a bunch of years? They could not even have comprehended in 1922 that more than 250 million vehicles would burn oil as gasoline in the United States alone this year. Obviously, that 1922 projection of a twenty-year supply was way off.
Predicting is a chancy business for people locked in the present. New technologies make yesterday’s predictions seem naïve. Yet, regardless of the lessons of the past, that there’s much for us to discover just as we discovered many new reserves of oil, we keep making dire predictions.
Will we, as the Geological Survey once predicted, run out of oil? Probably. We do live on a finite planet. Everyone can guess that we can’t keep eating a cake and still have that cake. But interestingly, we seem to have found ways to discover new oil reserves while changes in technologies have allowed us to acquire energy from sources the Geological Survey would not have known in 1922. True, you can’t eat a cake and still have that cake, but you can eat a cake and have a different one, even in a finite world.
Dire predictions seem to have been with us since before the augurs told Caesar to beware the Ides of March. But through the centuries there have been some who never stopped discovering. We could take this fact as a personal lesson. Do I have to tell you? Okay. The next time someone says you can’t do something, that you won’t have the resources, take that person to the gas station and let him or her watch you fill up your tank.
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