Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

Recently I saw one of Shell's Real Energy TV ads. I have TiVo, so I'm used to zipping through ads, but this one caught my eye because it was a good bit longer than the usual ad. This spot featured a Shell engineer working in Southeast Asia, who was being interviewed by a local reporter about the work Shell is doing there. I won't go through the whole story, but to summarize, after the interview, the engineer is sitting in a restaurant with his teenage son, who is drinking a milkshake. The kid slurps the last bit from the glass and his dad says, "Do that again." He has a "eureka moment" which leads to a design for a flexible drill that can snake into otherwise unreachable places to extract oil.

On the surface, the spot (and Shell's overall campaign) is about human creativity and how Shell is employing such creativity to meet the world's energy demands. The protagonist in the ad speaks of how "The challenge is to get to the world's reserves that we know about, but haven't yet been able to reach. Reserves that would otherwise go to waste." I got quite the opposite impression. I immediately thought about how increasingly expensive it is to go after more marginal oil reserves, and how Shell's prodigious wealth (and apparently boundless creativity) might be better spent devising a way to reduce the amount of carbon released into our environment. Untapped oil reserves are not a waste. They are a savings account. They represent millions of years of carbon sequestration, in the form of plant and animal matter trapped underground, pressed and heated until only concentrated hydrocarbons remain. Now we've managed to release these millions of years' worth of carbon in just a couple of centuries.

Humans can be incredibly creative when they have to survive, but we are also tragically short-sighted. Our brains are still largely wired for getting out of the way of predators, not assessing long-term risk and making the choices required to mitigate them. What we need are different solutions to the world's energy needs, not simply more of what got us into this mess in the first place. I fear that we won't really commit to finding these solutions until we've slurped every last drop out of the ground.