Low Imagination Energy

This week was the annual COGA (Colorado Oil and Gas) show. It is our local yearly come together where we brag, sell and commiserate with our fellows in the oil and gas business. Our keynote speaker this year was Boone Pickens, well known "maverick". Boone sounded a clarion call for windmills and natural gas fueled vehicles as a vision for the future of energy in the United States.

Windmills and natural gas fueled cars? Give me a break. My first thought was this is another example of why history treats those who know how to make money so poorly. Good businessmen, almost by definition, are lacking in the charisma that stirs the imagination necessary for great deeds. Of course we would all be cold and hungry, living in dirty caves haunted by vermin, if not for businessmen. But they don't often understand how to move beyond short sighted logic and excite the passion that drives us to the heights.

But my second thought was for the dullness of imagination in our present culture. After all Boone, and those like him, are not going to do more than hold a mirror up to what we believe possible. Currently there is an ad running on the radio about the wonders of HD Radio. The ad talks about the wonders of HD Radio and the built in intelligence of the radios that can use it. But the adman then wonders about where his flying car is? The ad is built around the idea that HD Radio is part of a wonderful future that was promised us decades ago (remember the Jetson's). Well the radio is here, but where are our flying cars?

As an immature teenage boy, interspersed with furtive visits to the pages of Playboy magazine, I was an avid reader of science fiction. In fact my absolute all time favorite novel is "We All Died at Breakaway Station" by Richard Meredith. But in everything I read was such a sense of optimism about the future that I am now living in. It was just an accepted fact that we would flying around the Solar System with large numbers of people living in "space" by now.

Well, teen age boys, despite their outward sophistication, are very naive. Reading Playboy to learn about women gives undeniable evidence of that. But our failure of imagination about energy is depressing. Our culture's expectation then was that we would be well along on the way to breaking the light speed barrier by now. Instead we are talking about building windmills to power our civilization. We are congratulating ourselves that the United States can be the "Saudia Arabia of Wind". I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I don't think that starships will be powered by windmills. I don't think they will be powered by natural gas either. We may create a really nice culture where every body uses hemp grocery shopping bags, composts their waste and takes a bicycle to work. We may "save the Earth" and all sing Kumbaya. I believe we can create that future if we wish to. And it may be a very pleasant place to live if you have a certain dullness of spirit. The Shire portrayed in "Lord of the Rings" comes to mind. But it will also be a dead end and exist at the sufferance of those nations and peoples who continued to imagine of greatness.