Last week, I attended a dinner at Houston’s Petroleum Club where former Shell President John Hoffmeister spoke about what he calls the impeding “energy abyss”.

A crisis so ugly that it will “put our lifestyles at risk over political symbolism”. He’s pretty outspoken about that, and his main issues are as follows:

1. Americans have a lot to learn about energy. About how much we use, where we get our supply, how the infrastructure works, and how it does and does not impact the environment.

2. Politicians are killing us. Making short-term decisions based on the “optics”, letting campaign slogans and political campaign cycles set our energy agenda is not sustainable.

3. The “energy independence” that Nixon promised by 1980 will take us 30 years to achieve if and only if we work together. Which means that #1 and #2 both have to happen.

4. The four pillars of a solid energy strategy are supply, demand, infrastructure and environment. That’s right. Even oil industry recognizes that the environment matters and that efficiency or curbing our skyrocketing demand are pieces of the puzzle.

According to Hoffmeister, “Americans use 20 Million barrels per to get through the day. That’s 10,000 gallons per second. We represent a full 25% of the world’s oil requirements. That’s just oil. We also use a train load of coal every 3 seconds.”

As someone whose job is recycling, I’m pretty excited about the focus on efficiency and curbing our skyrocketing demand for oil. Take plastics, for instance. They are directly made from oil. And we suck down and throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles …wait for it …every HOUR*. In a year, we use enough plastic water bottles to suck down enough oil to run 1.5 million cars on US roadways for an entire year**. And while that’s a huge problem, there are tons of other plastics and other materials in commercial and industrial use that have an even slighter chance of getting recycled than your water bottle.

If the “energy abyss” happens within the next ten years as he projects, I will feel pretty good that RecycleMatch has increased recycling and diversion of those resources. Every little bit counts towards energy independence and energy sustainability, right?

Whether recycling is at the forefront of energy policies or not (and the answer is not), I think it is important for us to realize that we actually have some common ground. What if we built on that common ground instead of tearing each other down? That would surely waste less energy.

* Clean Air Council

** Pacific Institute

http://businessshrink.biz/psychologyofbusiness/2008/04/26/americas-dirtly-little-oil-secret-plastic-bottles-and-bags/

http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html