Big Oil, Peak Oil: Rounds Not Looking Forward

"Rounds Looking Forward to the Hyperion Project," reads the headline in this mornings Yankton Press & Dakotan. The headline is oddly deceptive. Governor Rounds and all those eager to tear up Union County farmland and install a sprawling refinery suffer from a stunning inability to look forward... really forward.

How far forward is our governor looking to embrace an industry whose sunset is in sight? Oil production will peak -- it may already have peaked. Oil is finite. So is the lifetime of the oil industry. If built, the Hyperion refinery and the TransCanada pipeline will go idle in our lifetimes. Are we so determined to fill our present lives with all the oil we can burn that we will mortgage our children's lives to pay for technology and industry destined to become obsolete by the time our children need it? Are we so short-sighted that we will remain dependent on the products of Big Oil until the pipes run dry and then leave our kids to figure out their own solutions?

The rhetoric from Governor Rounds, Hyperion, TransCanada, and the rest Big Oil's boosters is utterly devoid of any acknolwedgement of the finite nature of the oil industry. Many of us will be around to see the refineries and pipelines stop adding value to our economy. We will see the mess we are left with: land permanently removed from agriculture through construction and contamination, prohibitively expensive to dismantle and clean up.

Want to look forward, Governor Rounds? Look forward to a day when, wishingly by foresightful choice but more likely by overconsumptive crisis, South Dakota has no oil to burn. What can we do now to prepare for that inevitability? What can we do to lay the foundations, not for Big Oil donations for our Congressional campaigns, but for our great-granchildren's energy security? What can we do to make our great-grandchildren say "Thank you" rather than "What the hell were you thinking?"

Build an oil refinery? Build an oil pipeline? Those aren't the right answers, not for our great-grandchildren.

Why would a truly forward-looking people put so much emphasis on Big Oil, a 200-year anomaly in the economic history of mankind? Why would we not prioritize uses of our land -- sustainable agriculture, wind power, solar power -- that have the potential to serve our great-grandchildren at least as well as they serve us?

Look forward, Governor Rounds. Look forward, South Dakota. Look forward not to increased tax revenues and "hopefully stabilized" oil prices in 2011; look forward to a healthy prairie where our great-grandchildren can still afford to live and work and eat in 2101.