Electricity comes from other planets

There are many days when I ride my bike to work and it affords me time and the inclination, since I am powering myself, to ponder my means of locomotion and its place in the big arc of History.

The other day while riding, Henry Miller's words came to mind: "I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast." I considered the speaker of this quote to be our carbon-powered age admitting that current conditions has it on the ropes.

Apart from the usual glum soothsayers, I don't think anyone could have predicted these shocks so soon: an oil price of $100 dollars a barrel, the Smart car sold in the US, continual media stories on climate change and peak oil, etc. Big Business is usually cast as the villian in this environmental and economic transformation, but the Titans understand that they have to plan long term, even if current federal leadership believes that Frostbite Falls should relish its new ability to offer Club Med weather.

What next? It doesn't seem like a far stretch to imagine that we will enter an age of electricity where motion will generate energy that will be transferred to other uses. Whether it's solar, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, tidal or even crowd movement, we won't be extracting it from below as we have in the past.

Or, I should say "we" in the developed world. As it is increasingly happening, the developed country is exporting our pollution and industrial processes to the developing world. They'll be faced with the bloody and expensive competition for carbon-based natural resources to fuel the energy-hogging industrial processes. As our biggest export is entertainment, we'll film it for the Thunderdome Consumer reality TV show and sell it back to them in syndication.

Of course I'm offering a very simplistic summary of a decades long process. There will be wars, market upheavels, political skirmishes fought over the pace, direction, and structure of our future energy market, but the way in which we live our lives won't force us to have daily interactions with Big Oil.

Instead, we'll face Little Energy where innovative startups will attempt to capture markets: new cars, new sources of plastic and other materials. These companies will of course compete and at some time in the future settle into conventional wisdom as entities necessary to our Way of Life, as the Railroads were considered unassailable in their day. But as De Gaulle said, the graveyard is full of indespensable men.

We'll sort out this conventional energy snafu in the next fifty years or so, just in time for the Viral Explosion that will make the Plague Years seem like a brief roll in smallpox blanket.