Empty Tank Empty Wallet: For Those Who Don't Own an Oil Well

(2011)

Prologue

The unmistakable putt-putt-putt-putt of a John Deere two cylinder was just background noise where I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. In the mid-nineteen fifties, ours was a community of cows, crops, farm trucks, and tractors. Except for an Amish family here and there, everybody used gasoline. A coal bin, ash cans, and coal furnace in the basement of the house were every-day-normal too. My chores included taking out the ashes.

I don't recall the word environment or ecology in anybody's conversation. From my parents and school, I did gradually learn about pollution though. Rivers, like the close-by Susquehanna, were beautiful but most weren't safe for swimming. They were still the every-day-normal means for carrying away industrial waste.

We were warned that the air in big cities like New York and Philadelphia, and especially Pittsburgh, was polluted... maybe we should stay down on the farm, where the air was clean. Pittsburgh back then was defined by steel, and the smoky burning of coal and coke to make it was part of the city's persona. Pennsylvania was home to coal and steel and trains.

I was fascinated by trains. The Pennsylvania Railroad was a colossus of commerce. It moved the freight, steel and coal, and people. Unimaginable at the time, in just 20 years it would be bankrupt, victim probably of the Interstate Highway System and cheap oil.

Cheap oil put cars at the center of the American way of life. For a kid growing up in farm country though, tractors had more immediate appeal. You could work on the farm, drive a tractor and get paid, long before your 16th birthday. The downside was the hard, unpleasant work, like shoveling manure into a spreader, that came with the tractor driving. Pulling that load to the field was the very reason for the tractor.

The tractor fancy passed quickly for me. In high school, amazing new power and freedom came with a car, even if it was Dad's. Obsession with cars would be overstatement of my attraction, but not by much. Cars weren't a passing fancy, but they did soon have competition from even more powerful, and bigger, machines. Fortunately, there were mentors who helped me understand that to do anything more than just watch ships, trains, and airplanes, from a distance, further education was required. The U. S. Navy offered the ticket.

I studied Mechanical Engineering and since the Navy needed engineers, it paid for my schooling. Ships are propelled by steam turbines. Steam is the entry point for studying thermodynamics, the science core of mechanical engineering. It was a formal course about the technology of converting fuel energy into useful work. In exchange for Uncle Sam's support, I agreed to serve.

The Navy had airplanes, too, and they were more interesting than ships. I became a Navy pilot.

Much of the Navy flight school program was about survival. The first principle is to never get into a situation, in the first place, where survival is in question. Rule number one is: Don't run out of gas. Every flight is a temporary triumph over gravity. Thermodynamics and fossil fuel make it possible. But the flight always ends with gravity superior. Every pilot knows that using up the fuel and running out too soon is a very bad mistake.

In military service there are hours of boredom, and times to be genuinely scared. Fear and boredom can trigger serious thinking. For me the thinking was also against a background accumulation of bits of information—data-points in today's jargon—that had made me skeptical of conventional wisdom and increasingly distrustful of pronouncements by the government, my employer. I spent over ten years in the Navy in one capacity or another, starting as an enlisted reservist while still in high school. It was a long enough time for me to come to the realization that what's reported sometimes just isn't so.

I started examining my assumptions about how the world works. I was especially intrigued by money and why there always seemed to be a fight over it in Washington. I wondered why, if we were the good guys, were there so many places in the world where they didn't like us. And if the United States was so powerful and on the right side of history, how was it that some little despot named Qaddafi, in Libya, could triple the price of crude oil and get away with it.

And then there was Earth Day and the book Silent Spring and an article in Time Magazine about a word completely new to me, ecology. While based in Maine, I began to appreciate more the unspoiled outdoors as I tromped along crystal-clear small streams in a new hobby, fishing for brook trout. I also saw the obvious downside of using rivers as sewers. Those beautiful little brooks I explored emptied into rivers that hauled offal from pulp and paper mills. Sometimes the water was nasty. That glimpse of the pristine disappearing into the polluted saddened me, but I didn't yet see the much bigger picture.

We know now—as many a fourth grader could explain—that there are connections between how we choose to live and the quality of the environment that surrounds us. Our modern way of life, with it's very high rate of consumption of energy and other resources can be destructive, and it is vulnerable to disruption. But I, like most, didn't see that clearly. I certainly didn't fully appreciate how dependent we were on a steady stream of cheap fossil fuel.

Partly in search of answers to big questions, and because I wanted a bigger dollar career track, I went back to school—business school.

I think of the MBA as higher education for the pragmatic generalist. It seemed like a good fit and the logical next step. The year of school that followed introduced me to finance and economics. One immediate benefit; money became a little less mysterious.

Being hired by a major airline is a career landmark, a real highpoint for a professional pilot. For me there was the added benefit that it ended a period of limbo. This year after the Navy had been the first time in my life that I wasn't on some kind of defined track or path, usually scripted by somebody else. I felt a sense of freedom, but I was also unemployed, and wasn't totally comfortable with that. I was glad to be finished with military service and happy to no longer be conflicted by a strongly felt disagreement with my the government's foreign policy, but I was still proud of my aviator's wings, and I certainly missed the paycheck. And the title pilot had stronger appeal than administrator. When pilot jobs became available midway through the MBA course, I jumped. School would have to wait. I went to work flying big airplanes—and burning lots of fossil fuel. It felt good to be back in the cockpit and back on track, this one completely of my choosing.

The last thing I expected was that just a year later my paycheck would get squeezed and my job threatened by an Arab Oil Embargo and jet fuel price spike. This was the beginning of a roller coaster ride on the supply and price of oil that lasted throughout my entire 30 year airline career.

My children's education was very important to me, so I took a seat on the local school board, with the plan to help make my kids public school experience the best possible. Not a year into my first term, a second Middle East crisis rapidly drove up the price of heating oil and school bus fuel, increasing school operating expenses substantially and dashing any hopes of new spending for improvements. Wake up call number two—the realization that it wasn't just workplace security being held hostage by fossil fuel dependency. For our schools it quickly became a question of; do we buy heating oil or books?

I didn't like the choices, so since I had the engineering background that was lacking in the school district's staff, I took on the task of reducing energy cost. There were easy opportunities. Thanks to previously cheap energy, leaky single pane windows and minimal insulation were the norm. This was in brutally-cold-winter New Hampshire. We made repairs and upgrades. The district saved a lot of money.

I experimented at home, too. Did we have to burn oil? Could we keep warm with renewable energy? No doubt my two flexible kids and understanding spouse sometimes saw the projects as a little weird. Nobody discouraged me though. Of course there was some learning by mistake. My wife probably said it best. We live in a solar heated house. We wear lots of sweaters.

The issue of global warming entered my consciousness in the mid 80s, but it didn't really grab my attention immediately. There was plenty of competition from life's other challenges and enjoyments. Furthermore, by then fuel prices were falling, so energy receded as something to worry about. Prices continued downward through the 90s.

In 2000, an oil man was elected to the White House. Along with him came a Vice President who also had made his millions in the fossil fuel industry. I didn't much like either of them.

By then I was living in Florida, and it was my habit to pay pretty close attention to politics. I witnessed some of the legally questionable activity around the final decision to send this team to the White House. I wasn't expecting good things but had accepted that whatever would be would be.

Early in the Bush term the outline of a new energy policy started to take shape. It looked like the goal was to have Americans use more fossil fuels. Federal government support for renewable energy was shoved aside as the tarnished folly of tree huggers, the furthest thing from good economics and good sense.

The Bush-Cheney policy didn't seem like good sense to me. I'd witnessed damage from dependence on oil. I also thought oil prices were probably set for a rebound, which would make this a bad time to encourage greater use. Furthermore I'd piloted many flights to Europe and had layovers in places where gasoline was two or three times as expensive as it was at home. It struck me that life there was pretty good, even though Europeans used much less energy and paid more for it than Americans. It seemed plausible that fuel prices returning to an upward trend might even be a good thing. For sure, greater dependency looked like greater vulnerability to me. And hadn't the White House policy makers been paying any attention to developments in climate science? Warnings about danger from global warming were becoming more explicit, consistent, and dire. Independent research was increasingly validating linkage between this warming and fossil fuel burning. What were the White House folks thinking?

My experience with oil-dependency-caused disruptions had started nearly 30 years earlier. With each one I resolved to become personally less vulnerable, but like most I was usually surprised and never quite prepared when the next disruption hit. These periodic energy crises were always temporary in nature, and though unpleasant, the damage was manageable. Also, we'd always been able to muddle through when there were mistakes in Washington. I expected mistakes from this administration but thought we'd survive.

Then came 9/11.

We were on vacation and enjoying lunch in a busy little restaurant in Bilbao, in the Basque region of northern Spain. The waiter interrupted our conversation and motioned me back to the kitchen. I stood with staff and watched a tiny black and white TV on a shelf above a food prep table as the second Boeing 767 hit the twin towers.

This was obviously an attack. There must have been hijackers. Like every airline pilot, I had been trained on how to handle a hijacking. I thought we knew how to do it—hijackers would not be successful. I quickly started to imagine what might have happened aboard the aircraft. I saw myself piloting one of those 767s and wondered if I had been in what was surely a fight in the cockpit, the outcome might somehow have been different. It was scary. Even now, nearly twelve years later, just thinking about it bumps up my pulse rate.

America was under attack. How long would it last? Who was this enemy? How good were they? The center of the financial district of the United States was rubble. Were we about to see a total collapse of Western economies and culture? This was uncharted territory.

Global questions pretty quickly gave way to thoughts of personal survival strategy, right where I was, in northern Spain. Looking back now, it's kind of amusing. My focus, in hindsight, was on the trivial. I wondered if we had enough cash for food and lodging until we could make it home. Could we get money? Could we even get home, or were we stranded by war? Would anybody take our credit cards? Was there still money? The closest ATM might provide an answer.

If the technology for commerce and convenience, that we depended on, had raced far ahead of our ability to protect it, as some had warned, the notion that it was all a house of cards would be confirmed. Remember, Y2K was pretty fresh in people's minds. Our computers' ability to deal with a year that didn't start with 19 had been tested successfully, but there was still nervousness. If the robustness claimed by the digital world's spokesmen and cheerleaders was real, maybe my request at the cash machine would produce a normal and reassuring response.

Relief. The robot handed over pesetas drawn against my account in Atlanta as routinely as ever, just two hours after the strike and when New York, thought to be the center of the financial universe, was the scene of death and absolute chaos. It looked like the West had not collapsed instantly, even though the bricks and mortar was a shambles. The digital technology really did provide redundancy.

The months that followed were strange. There were real and imagined additional threats, but I remember starting to feel good that Americans were coming together and sensing that most of us really do love this country. During my frequent layovers in Europe, I found that we have genuine friends there, too. There was empathy and sympathy for our loss. I, like most, gave credit to President Bush for success at putting voice to what is best about our nation and people. During this time we learned more about who had attacked us and started to understand their grander plan.

Then, as things seemed to be returning to normal, I stumbled onto information that was a total shock. I'm pretty sure my reaction was, What!!?? You've got to be kidding me! (the verb may well have been a more emphatic