Charley Reese Looks at Dependence on Electricity: "Keep the Lights On"

King Features Syndicate, Inc. ^ | 08-27-03 | Reese, Charley

[Theodore R.]

Keep The Lights On

Two things all of us should learn from the big blackout: (1) We are addicted to electricity and cannot function without it. (2) Politicians have neglected America's infrastructure, which — like everything else — ages, wears out or gets outgrown.

When Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric light bulb, the primary use of electricity was to provide illumination. My mother remembered the first time she ever saw an electric light bulb. She looked at it with awe and wonder. If illumination were still the only use we made of electricity, then power losses would be a mere inconvenience.

Illumination can be handled with battery-powered lights or even oil lamps or candles. It is the heavy work that stops dead without electric power: subways, elevators, escalators, computer systems, heating and cooling systems for gigantic buildings, water pumps, gasoline pumps, assembly lines, refrigeration units, traffic lights and air-traffic-control towers. Imagine if New York City had been without power not for a few hours, but for a week or more. The economic losses would have been enormous. The people of the Big Apple would have found themselves in the 19th century and unable to cope.

Old buildings had windows that would open. Modern buildings have been sealed to save money on heating and cooling costs. When those big air conditioners stop, the interiors of the buildings quickly heat up to dangerous levels. If your apartment or hotel room is on the 60th floor and you're at ground level, without elevators, you can either give up or try mountain climbing. Even if you get there, you will have no water to drink or to flush your toilet, no refrigeration to keep your food cold, no lights and in many cases no fresh air, unless you want to break a window. If you've ever been to a store that lost its computer system, you know what a mess that is. Prices are in codes that only computers can read.

It's ironic, but we have engineered ourselves into a state of total dependency on electric power. We have no choice but to build more generating capacity and more transmission capacity. And since electric energy can be generated only by the expenditure of other sources of energy, the future in the long run can be very iffy if we don't make the right decisions.

When the oil runs out — and it will eventually — it won't be just cars and trucks and airplanes that will come to a halt, it will be the electric generators, too. Hydroelectricity and wind generate only a small fraction of the power we use. The majority is generated by fossil fuels — oil, gas or coal — with atomic energy next. An agrarian society can at least survive without fossil-fuel energy. An industrial, high-tech society cannot. Cut the power to a big city like New York or London and you effectively kill it. Cut the power to the whole country and we'll join the Third World poverty class.

I've always thought the Industrial Revolution was misnamed. It was really the Energy Revolution. It was when men devised machines powered by fossil fuels to do work that material prosperity began to spread. Prior to that, the main source of energy to do work was human and animal muscle, with a little assist from wind and water.

We are not at the end of the fossil-fuel revolution, but we are definitely at the beginning of the end of it. Some petroleum engineers believe that 2010 will mark the high point of oil production, and after that it's all downhill. In the meantime, of course, world population grows and grows.

Probably not since the American Revolution have we had a greater need for really smart and wise political leadership than right now. I suggest we abandon the habit of accepting the status quo of both major political parties, which seem only to produce handsome faces indebted to special-interest money. I believe that from here on into the future, the price of political mediocrity is going to be higher than we can afford to pay.

© 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

[G.Mason]

"I suggest we abandon the habit of accepting the status quo of both major political parties, which seem only to produce handsome faces indebted to special-interest money."

And?

Gee, for a minute there I was thinking Charlie was going to say something, like "let the revolution begin".

Sigh...........

[Iris7]

I enjoyed your post. I like your tagline, "Lessons of life need not be fatal." "Need not", indeed. But the Lessons of Life are generally very close calls, indeed!

[G.Mason]

"........."Lessons of life need not be fatal." "Need not", indeed. But the Lessons of Life are generally very close calls, indeed!"

Thanks for the kind words.

Very, very close!

We who survive them and heed the lesson go on.