Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
time to think and discover. We should be grateful to past generations for producing and consuming fossil
fuels, rather than restricting them and trying to subsist on something inferior.
If we slow down our progress, including the generation of new ideas, by using inferior energy, we de-
serve nothing but contempt from future generations—for example, from those who die prematurely be-
cause a medical cure comes twenty years later than it needed to.
The production of energy increases the production of knowledge, and it is knowledge that enables one
generation to begin where the last left off.
Besides our ideas and knowledge, another form of past action that benefits us is past wealth creation.
Imaginethatwehadalltheknowledgewedotodaybutwewereplacedinaprecivilizationenvironment.
By popular accounts, this is a state “rich in natural resources.” Would we want to be there? Of course not,
because those “resources” would not be genuine resources; they would be only potential resources, raw
materials, and it would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to even start using them to create
wealth.
The more resources that have been created in the past, the more prosperous societies have been, the
more resources they leave behind for us to start with. How grateful am I to the man who first took a streak
of rust from a rock and turned it into iron ore, instead of letting it sit there for me and my generation.
That process of resource creation provides the material for the next stage of resource creation. It means
taking iron ore and turning it into something more valuable, steel, then taking that steel and turning it
into something more valuable, a bunch of girders, then turning those into something much more valuable,
a skyscraper, which becomes even more valuable as the workplace for thousands and thousands of pro-
ductive people, who increase the value of each of those workplaces by starting any number of productive
enterprises, which ultimately go back to taking raw materials and making them more valuable through an
ingenious combination of machine power, manpower, and superior methods.
Life can be great, indefinitely. Each of us must try to make the best of his life, by creating as much as
he wants to benefit his life, and to take joy in the fact that his interests are harmonized with those of his
fellow men and his children and his children's children, knowing that the greatest gift he can give to both
himself and to the future is to be a creative human being who enjoys his life.
The final point to make about consumption and efficiency and waste is that the most valuable thing we
have is our time. If we want to talk about a resource, if human life is our standard, then the most important
resource we should be focused on is our time. Using fossil fuels buys us time. It buys us more life. It buys
us more opportunities. It buys us more resources. Fossil fuels are an amazing tool with which to create this
ultimate form of wealth, this supreme resource: time to use our minds and our bodies to enjoy our lives as
much as possible.
Time, and the quality of the life we can enjoy in that time, is already less than it should be, and is
threatened to become far, far less than it should be, because even though using fossil fuels is moral, our
society does not know it. The voices guiding our society have convinced many of us that the energy of life
is immoral and are calling for restrictions that, from all the evidence we have, would be a nightmare.
