Feeling a Little Gassy

As I have said here before, it is always the little things that get my sick mind working. While puttering around on the Internet before beginning my daily grind, I found a charming little story about the town of Novy Urengoi, in the Arctic, known as the "gas capital of Russia", which sits atop the second-largest natural gas field in the world.
The story went on to detail the struggles of the people who work there, in sub-zero temperatures and all, in the pursuit of a fossil fuel. Generally, it is the only business they have there, so it really isn't so much of a struggle as it is a way of life.

The last three paragraphs of the story got me going:

Nikolai Dubina, one of those early pioneers, admits that the main gas field's heyday is behind it, and now it produces half of what it did in the 1980s. Now, Gazprom is starting to turn its attention to elsewhere in Russia. But for the citizens of Novy Urengoi, 70 percent of whom depend on the gas giant, a future without gas is unthinkable; for the citizens of western Europe, who are on the receiving end of the pipeline, it's a similarly worrying prospect.

But that may be something for future generations to worry about. The Urengoi gas field may be 70 percent depleted. But that last 30 percent still holds several trillion cubic meters of the stuff. And other outlying sites may yet come through, keeping Novy Urengoi, the frontier town of the north, going for a few more decades.

"We have enough gas for our daughters and granddaughters," promises Mr. Dubina, "so stop worrying folks."

Sure, Nikolai, I'll stop worrying. After all, the world is only going to last another 100 years, right? As long as our grandchildren are taken care of, we can continue to use fossil fuels until our lungs fill with carbon monoxide and we are so warm that we have to cut the sleeves off our t-shirts.
As the article said, "let other generations worry about it". Meanwhile, we will keep buying giant vehicles to make next-door cigarette runs and build McMansion's that need two compressors to run the air-conditioning, and heater blowers the size of an SUV. That's great - it will be somebody else's problem.
People use the same thought pattern when they throw a cigarette butt out the window (of their giant SUV) or leave trash on the floor of a movie theater. "Let someone else clean it up." We are free to behave as we wish, so long as there is someone else around to pick up our trash. Why take responsibility for our actions when leaving them for someone else to clean up is so much easier?

What they are doing, in reality is condemning their grandchildren to a life of discontent and uncertainty. When their generation pumps that gas hole dry, the struggle will be theirs, because their ancestors did nothing to prepare them for life beyond anything that produces energy by burning something. As long as we don't have to worry about it now.

For all the fuss we make about educating our children and trying to make their lives better than ours, we do nothing to improve the bigger picture. You can say that the science behind global warming studies is fantasy, or that we are slowly becoming more energy efficient, but you cannot deny that we will eventually run out of natural gas and crude oil. It is inevitable.

Our grandchildren will have plenty of education and maybe even more money than us, but what they will be left with is a world where they will have to fight for space to move and air to breathe, while the animals with which they co-exist will similarly struggle to find a friendly environment.

I think we owe them more than that.