Reply #15: Everybody thought I was crazy. [View All]

[Gregorian]

I screamed about combustion for decades. Nobody would listen. In 1990 I was embarrassed by talking about no blood for oil in my office. In both cases, I didn't know what I was talking about. I only had that intuition. In many ways, I'm an idiot. But each person has something. I have a feeling. An overwhelming one.

Just now I was reading an email from someone in another forum. "Are you going to the GEAR tradeshow in Portland?" We're both engineers. He has a business doing optical equipment design and prototyping for universities. As usual I repelled another person by not being willing to leap into my car and drive all over the country. He has no problem with driving a thousand miles.

And last night I was looking at my other favorite forum, the biking forum. And this guy has an awesome mountain bike. I love bikes. More than just about anything. But on his website I noticed he either owns, or flies for someone, a private jet. 13,000 horsepower. 13,000 horsepower!


Well, at this point I don't have much to say. I will say this, in a modern society we can, and I will, equate each human with a number of BTU's. It's not a categorization. It's a fact. In a MODERN society. It's the modern style of living combined with the number of people. Six billion is a very very large number of users. Some use more. Some use less. I fill two garbage cans each YEAR. I drive to the grocery store once a week, and I would ride my bike if I weren't worried about getting hit by a car. We lost a bicyclist in my forum this week to a car. In a modern society each person is consuming energy in an intense way. We can change that. But we can't engineer our way out of it in time. We either change our habits, or it's over.