To: president@whitehouse.gov
From: S. Morningthunder <mthunder@jreyes.ifisicacu.unam.mx>
Subject: I was worried...
Date: 22 Feb 1997 20:40 CST -0600
Message-ID: <02221997204032um@jreyes.ifisicacu.unam.mx
Mexico, D.F.
Dear Mr. Bill Clinton;
It's pretty unlikely that anything I've ever written to you actually gets into your hands, you being the President and all, but that's all right. I'm happy to express my appreciation at the highest level I can reach, and surely you must have had something to do with the looking ahead that was obviously required.
I have to tell you that I was mighty worried there for a while about the future of the global economic system, what with its dependence upon a never ending increase in the supply of petroleum. If the supply of energy doesn't grow and stay cheap it's darn tough to make them GNPs bigger, and everybody knows that's the only way the have-nots are gonna get a little better off, assuming of course that they quit their lazy ways, which is primarily the reason they're in the fix they are.
Yep, I look at a graph of the history of Continental US Petroleum Extraction and it's even worse than a roller coaster ride. Up, up she goes, and then whump, all of a sudden down down she starts to head, towards 0. Too bad they didn't hold off on running out, instead of missing out like they did on that big price rise right afterwards. I can tell you this much, if that ever happened to the global supply I'd sure hate to be in a business that depended a whole lot on petroleum products, like those farmers and truckers. Course everybody knows that happened in this country only 'cause the US stops at its borders and edges and kind of ends while you can just keep on going around and around the earth and never get to the end of it, so for that same reason apart from the US the world'll never run low on conventional oil.
Most important of all, there are some new developments which just came to my attention that will solve any problems the US might've had. We've got to hand it to them scientific boys. They can always pull it out of the hat and rescue us from going over the cliff. Shoot, they haven't figured out for sure what to name it yet, but they got these little pills that we're gonna put in a tank of water and then step back, cause it'll become 100 octane. I heard that the name was going to be Pac Man Power Pills, but maybe I'm mistaking that with something else. Anyway, it'll be so cheap that we can build a world just covered with highways and more powerful cars that'll let ya go anywhere ya want on automatic control, and fast too. You'll just punch into your Hyper-Drive Navigator the destination you want to go to, say New Delhi for example, and away she goes, over the 24-lane bridge that we're gonna build across the Bering Straits, and just one day away.
It's all on account of the fact that they discovered a thick layer of high quality petroleum like the outside of a ball way deep down in the earth, using something named "Open Sesamegraphic Imagery and Comparative Reflection Processing". A-biogenic they call it, 'cause it's been there forever, even before plants and animals. Course it's real compressed and concentrated having all that weight on top of it, but that's what makes it possible to use as a pill. All we have to do is dig it out from a hundred miles down or so and pop a little bit in the tank. Why with a couple hundred kilos you could probably make it to Mars and back!
Shoot, that's only part of it! The other day I was talking to Richard Stallman. He's one of them top boys at MIT in computers, so of course there's nothing they don't know. He told me that things were going so good that we're gonna be able to put fuel cells in all the cars and run the electricity grid off of them. Kinda backwards to having electric vehicles that you charge from a plugin! Course I suspect he was referring to that cold fusion stuff, 'cause otherwise you'd have to find a way to call in a whole lot of hydrogens. But then I don't know. Most likely those scientific boys have already got their hydrogen call worked up, but they don't want to let it out yet 'cause of all the grief it would bring to the natural gas producers. Downright put'em out of business.
Yeah, I was more than a bit worried. Why I got all my money spread between the bank and the stock market like most folks, and those boys they do all right as long as everything's growing. The bankers with their fractional reserve system can lend out a whole lot more than they got, which of course they like to do; but if they lose some principal it really cuts into them 'cause they lose at the same multiple as they're lending at, which I reckon is at about 20 times right now.
So I can see why it was kinda worrisome when Mexico talked about dropping just 20 billion out of the stack-up of money being owed and paid interest on. As for that stock market that just don't stop climbing, they of course are depending upon everything keeping on growing and wouldn't even want to think about what would happen if such as the Big Three went down. And I was kinda thinking that would just be the beginning of the rout if we suddenly figured that this whole petroleum business was gonna turn into a washout. Then I worried some more when I recollected how things had went pretty rough for a good while all over the world after the last time the gasoline lines got a little tight, and that was mostly from just squabblin' over the prices and didn't have nothing to do with really running short.
So all in all you can understand why I'm right grateful to them scientific boys for being able to change water into gasoline, which of course is a whole lot more important than into wine.
Hydrogen: Next
Steve Morningthunder
Institute of Physics, National Autonomous University of Mexico
mthunder@jreyes.ifisicacu.unam.mx
[Slightly different version sent to vice-president, & newsgroups talk.environment, sci.envrionment].