This being Earth Day, I’ve been thinking about…erm...well...Earth. But more precisely, I’ve been think about our relationship – as the sole sentient race of beings known to exist - with the little spec of galactic dust we call home. I mean, the place isn’t getting any bigger, you know?

Homo Sapiens: “species virtually indistinguishable from living people, dating to as early as 100,000 years ago. We have a worldwide distribution, arriving in Australia around 60,000 years ago and in North and South America between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago.”

Hell, that’s not too damn bad is it? “Worldwide distribution,” I like the sound of that. If the race of modern humans were a corporation I just might buy stock in it. We’re productive buggers, and there’s more of us every single day. You know, like bacteria in a Petri dish…only we’re eating parts of the dish away.

Global desertification and deforestation are forcing us to get more from less in terms of agriculture. A drought here, or an early frost there has been known to cause waves to ripple through the world economy as effectively as fluctuations in oil prices. Food is, after all, pretty important stuff when you stop to think about it.

Food is difficult to make. Not like perfect omelet difficult, I’m talking about actual food production. Whether you’re a vegemite or an omnivore, food needs to be born, raised, harvested, packaged, and delivered before any off us here in the industrialized world ever even see it. That’s where the energy I’ve been thinking about comes in.

What if we sorta just ran out of energy one day? Or, more specifically, what if we ran out of oil? Sure there’s lots out there right now, but we seem to be pretty good at sucking it out of the ground and burning it. You might even say we have it down to a science. It’s pretty well accepted that we will run out of oil one day. There is only so much of the stuff to begin with, and making it takes time. Well, time and dinosaurs, but we’re already out of them. Current estimates put us on course to reach “peak” production sometime between 2007 and 2013, after that we start the “not enough oil to go around for everyone on Earth to eat” phase of human history.

Interestingly, just as I’ve been considering this imminent energy problem, and – I think justifiably – freaking out about it, several sci-fi level advancements in energy production technology have been made public. Funny – these announcements coincide with Earth Day. Easter too, but that’s neither here nor there.

Changing World Technologies, WaveCrest Laboratories, and Ferro Solutions each have products that seem like they could help human beings evolve beyond our centuries long dependence on fossil fuels.

The first, Changing World Technologies, has snagged big name investors and some good press after announcing they have a technology that can convert biomass into oil in hours instead of millennia. Nifty, eh? They also claim to be able to do the same with any substance containing carbon: “tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores.” This is great, but we’ll still have to burn the stuff.

WaveCrest Laboratories on the other hand embeds electrical generators into already moving machinery. This is a great idea. Why don’t the tires of our cars produce any energy? Now they can. WaveCrest just named General Wesley Clark - fresh off his stint as a CNN military analyst, and rumored briefly to have been a possible Democratic candidate for President in 2004 – as their CEO. Keep your eye on this company.

Lastly, Ferro Solutions has developed a new technology “that scavenges energy from the minute vibrations machines create when they're running.” Like the WaveCrest innovation, this uses a simple principle: You don’t need to make more energy if you can use the energy you’ve already got.

I have to say, reading about all of these technologies in the span of a couple of days is pretty stunning. Did the cavalry arrive just in time? Will these and other scientific advances be enough to counter-balance our rampant oil consumption before 2007? I don’t know about you, but after this past winter here in Maine I’ll be watching the state global oil production very closely for the next few years.

Act locally, think globally. Conserve.

Labels: environmentalism, oil, technology