Past Insights on the Consumption of Finite Resources

 Plus Current Questions by Richard Grahn

08/29/2010 -- Nikola Tesla was considered by many in his day to be a crackpot when he proposed wild ideas like transmitting electricity directly through the Earth (using the ground we walk on as a conductor and delivery system) or "heating" the ionosphere for communications and other purposes. While much of the world around us today is directly influenced by the work of this eclectic personality, few know that he died virtually penniless and even fewer know anything at all about the man who was instrumental in the harnessing of Niagara Falls as one of America's first major sources of renewable energy, discovered alternating current and created fluorescent lighting (to name just a few accomplishments).

Regardless of what you think about some of the ideas this scientist and inventor put down on paper (or if you ever heard of him), it's hard to put aside the following warning penned by Telsa over 90 years ago, long before the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and long before the topic of global warming had even begun to heat up our collective imagination.

"No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations."

Tesla was a product of the Industrial Revolution and as such was a proponent of technology and energy. At the same time, he realized a very fundamental fact about the use of fossil fuels that isn't ever going to change for the race we know as human, here on our little rock in space. Fossil fuel is finite and to continue to use it like there's no end, is to purchase a dark future for our successors. While he may not have foreseen issues like global warming or massive oil spills and environmental damage on a oceanic scale, he could certainly see that draining oil out of the proverbial barrel was a recipe for an empty barrel eventually.

With his work at Niagara Falls, Tesla pointed the way toward a future with cleaner, renewable energy but, like many of his other ideas, he was well ahead of his time and we, as a world, are struggling to catch up. The graph to the left demonstrates the lack of worldly adherence to Tesla's warning and the easy way out that is still teasing us toward even greater global degradation. This author's question is simply, when are we going to stop driving our world down the same ecological, environmental and economic dead-ends of history and start propelling ourselves toward a sensible, sustainable future?

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