The Overuse of Energy Resources | Breakthrough

We live in a time where it is readily apparent that if we proceed at the pace we are proceeding, continuing to overuse the resources available to us in the way we are overusing them, we're going to run out. I don't think people really understand what "run out" means. I think especially westerners, I think we just don't get it. But things really do run out.

Maybe it's that we live in a culture that denies mortality; we cannot imagine our own end, and so somehow that odd, skewed point of view applies to everything. There must be limitless, almost, there. But things really do run out—lives run out, and resources run out—and there are real consequences to the exhaustion of a thing.

We all, every human being, has faced loss. There are very few people watching the program who don't know what it's like to lose someone, and yet we forget that we can lose things too. So we have to treat our resources the way we treat other lives—as something precious and finite.

For me, what is always quite inspirational is what one person can do—that a single person can make a difference. I think in the stories that we've explored or at least touched on, we've seen that just a person with a vision, just a person with a dream, can change the world. I think we know this intellectually, and yet somehow we forget.

I think we can never be reminded too often that it simply takes one person to change everything. My very favorite thing I learned about our ability to resource and convert all sorts of things into energy is the wheel. The wheel is how we operationalize and utilize energy; it's how we master it. It's the yoke of energy.

I had no idea that reductively most every kind of energy generation under the sun turns on the wheel. That was extraordinary for me! I sort of thought whoever that guy was with that weird stone, who decided to round the edges and roll it down a hill, was really onto something.