De Nile isn't just a river in Egypt

I saw a letter to the editor in my local paper where the writer said he wouldn't be voting for Obama because the Senator had the nerve to point out that the rest of the world will not tolerate us using more of the earth's resources then our fair share as per our population percentage. Though the age of the person is unknown, I wouldn't surprised to find out that the person was one who is a baby boomer or older, a person who grew up at a time of cheap energy. Sorry to break the news, but the cheap energy days are gone and they may never return, at least until we figure out a way to get cheap energy from something other than fossil fuels. And that may take quite a while.

Some aren't going to like to hear this, but we need to start adapting to our brave new world. Even if prices fall for oil and gas, India and China, are changing their societies to be more like ours -- automobile dependent and industrial. While it's nice that their economies are improving, they also compete with us for gas and oil. As anyone who took Economics 101 knows, supply and demand rule the commodities market (with many exceptions of course, but that is still the basic rule) and as demand rises for something that has a limited supply, prices will rise.

Some want to counter this supply problem by drilling off shore or in Alaska. We may need to do that, but not just to keep prices artificially low for a few more years. We may need to do that because supplies in other lands have become off limits to us for various reasons, such as they have run out. As much as high energy prices affect my wallet, we should not be drilling for oil or removing taxes just to support our wasteful lifestyle. We need to tighten our belts and adjust our living standards.

Instead of investing in a system whose best days are behind it, we need to start investing in finding better energy sources, either alternatives like hydrogen or solar, or figuring out a way to make the fossil fuels we use last much longer by squeezing whatever energy we can from those sources. That does not mean we have to park our cars and all move back into the cities. We can use what we have more intelligently. We can invest in making our homes more efficient. We can invest in more mass transit. We can start requiring that office parks provide shuttles from central bus or train terminals. We can start encouraging offices and people to move to denser areas. All this will take time. It took a half century for us to build our suburban lifestyle, it will take another half century to reduce it. But denying that we have a problem will only delay the inevitable.

Half a century ago, the computing power that powers cell phones that we throw away year after a year took up a whole room and cost thousands and thousands of dollars. If, over the years, computer makers can make such improvements to computers, than engineers should be able to the same to the combustible engine we have been using for the last century. Its time to move on and realize that our life style can't continue as it was. The sooner we start preparing for it, the better we'll be when energy prices rise high enough to really blow out our economy.