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By Root 1355 0

enough to meet the energy needs of 6 million energy-guzzling Americans; wind power, which in just eleven years has gone from 15 to 2,652 megawatts; hydroelectric power, which satisfies as much as a third of the power needs of many developing countries and has grown from under 50,000 to well over a half million megawatts since 1950; and nuclear power—although the environmental dangers have brought it to a virtual standstill in the last few years after reaching a high in 1990 of 328,000 megawatts or less than half of hydroelectric.17 Yet all of these resources together have made only a small dent in world petroleum consumption—considerably less than the dent made by the oil crises and recessions of the seventies and eighties.18 Global production after peaking in 1979 at almost 63 million barrels a day has settled at between 59 and 60 million barrels a day since 1989: this represents a full 40 percent of the total energy globally consumed each day, and while production is well under its peak potential today, long-term prospects grow dimmer as the time frame grows longer. The advanced economies that are creating McWorld depend on the automobile, a zealously petroleum-dependent mode of transportation that symbolizes both prosperity and the individualism and mobility associated with liberal democratic societies: how then can developing countries be dissuaded from striving to automobilize their societies as China now wishes to do?19

The world still spins on the energy of fossil fuels—nonrecyclable and irreplaceable. The United States represents an especially foreboding case study, for here is one of the world’s richest fossil fuel producers using up its own resources in an orgy of consumption that is reflected neither in elevated living standards nor in a proportionately larger GDP. Nor have we learned much from two major crises in supply and our ever more debilitating dependency on foreign oil: gas prices remain absurdly low, taxes (even after the Clinton administration’s budget initiative added 4.3 cents) are insignificant, and strategic stockpiles unimpressive.

Even more than with minerals, energy resources represent a form of power that seems to shrink as it grows. That is the irony of modernization, described by modernity’s first incisive critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had seen that the power given us by science and technology to gratify our needs actually compounds and multiplies them so that as our power increases our satisfaction diminishes. If happiness is a function of needs in harmony with our capacity to satisfy them, “progress” will always mean that power, however fast it grows, will be outstripped by needs, which grow faster. Hence, modern man’s conundrum: the more powerful he becomes, the more miserable he feels. All that we have only serves to make us “need” more, and the more we have the more we need in order to protect what we have. Like the proverbial landowner who yearns only for the land adjacent to his, our modern consumer needs only products that are proximate to products he already possesses. The TV “needs” the VCR, which “needs” a laser disc player, which “needs” a computer, which “needs” endless software. The automobile first “needs” theft protectors and radar detectors and cassette players and onboard computers, and then it needs places to go and drive-in facilities, then parking lots and strip malls and pretty soon it needs all of what passes for modern civilization—goods that a person must slave for over a lifetime to begin to be able to afford. And then of course she will complain that she has no leisure to enjoy the “possessions” that turn out to feel more like her owners than her property.

What Hobbes called the quest for power after power that ends only in death has become the quest for oil wellhead after oil wellhead that ends only in economic and environmental bankruptcy. In America, it hardly seemed possible that supply could ever be overtaken by demand. From the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania just before the Civil War—a discovery that would make John D. Rockefeller’s fortune