Science Time With Six

Or should perhaps this piece be really titled “Okay, idiot, one more time, this is why oil costs so damned much…..”

Way back when I were a cubling mystic, some nice men from the local nuclear power plant came to our school to show and tell us all about the wonders of fissing U235 atoms apart to boil water to turn steam turbines to light our homes. Believe it or not, for 2nd-graders, the talk was frank and very high-tech, amazing, too, we asked some very sharp questions. Mine were more into the mechanics, yes, obviously.

But one girl asked the best one: “Sir, why?”

“Because,” this nice man said, and to this day, I can still see the stern look he handed her, “One day, honey, within your lifetime, we will run out of petroleum products.”

He was dead over the numbers flared. (Pilotspeak for the prettiest touchdown imaginable, you park the bird dead at the end of runway…sexy!) Years later, I would read of the scientist and geophysicist, M King Hubbert, and his amazing theory: Peak Oil.

You punks and punkettes weren’t around for Peak One, me, Lee, Mix, others, we old timers were. The images online pale to me sweating my ass off, seated in my Ford Pinto, waiting two blocks away from El Cheapo gas. Cheap? 99 and 9 and climbing. The Arab Oil Embargo was at warp. Nixon was still in the White House. Gas that used to piss off Papa at 39-n-9 was now at 99-n-9. A dollar? Soon, we were told.

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