At the passing of each century, people become seduced by the new and different and turn scornful of the old and established.
Nothing in nature, except human nature, says this should be so. The cosmos goes about its business heedless of seconds, minutes, years, centuries-which exist only because humans evolved into the needs for some sense of calibrated time and for periodic reasons to party.
So, nature`s indifference to time notwithstanding, every 100 years we celebrate the arrival of two zeros on the right side of the designation our ancestors invented for calendar years. And in the several years preceding, we worship all things new and condemn everything old.
Now we steady ourselves for not just two zeroes but three. And can you feel it? Do you come away from television and newspapers and-of course-the internet with the sense that human destiny itself must swerve onto some new course in a few months` time when the year gets four new digits?
Constants
With computers and the internet already overhauling human habits, the millennial turn looms like some metaphysical boundary between the familiar and the unknown, forebodingly illuminated by the Y2K bug. All the world, it seems, must change on Jan. 1, 2000.
It won`t, however-not in any important way. People will still need food, shelter, companionship, a sense of worth in relation to something beyond themselves. They have needed those things in all past millennia; they will need them no less in the next.
For the premillennial moment, though, attention to life`s fundamentals yields to our urge to throw out the old and embrace the new.
In the midst of this preparty mood the oil and gas industry must somehow make rational economic decisions and seek rational political choices about the energy that fuels human activity.
Evolution required
As the special report beginning on p. 37 notes, change is coming to the fuel mix. It is unrealistic for anyone in the industry to expect otherwise.
It is just as unrealistic to think that the generally environmentalist reasons for a fuel-mix change overrule the laws of economics and thermodynamics. Those laws are as constant as human needs and work-as environmentalists too often forget-in a shared dynamic.
What most needs changing is the growing compulsion, where energy is concerned, to throw out the old to make way for the new. The old can become cleaner; the new can become less costly. People working in the next millennium-working to satisfy needs that never fundamentally change, whatever the date-will need both.
Bob Tippee
Editor
