It’s been almost universally predicted that the United States will, within my lifetime, run out of two things. First, room to put the ever-expanding tons and tons of garbage produced by our nonstop desire for what we want, when we want it – the kind of compulsive consumerism with which we are often said to be addicted. Second, our supply of the fossil fuels that power our automobiles, boats, airplanes and homes, particularly oil and natural gas. The arguments, as I recall, have never been based on “whether or not” this will happen but, rather, only when. For decades we’ve been alarming ourselves about these “inevitables,” doomsday-thinking ourselves into scenarios requiring us to ship our garbage on rocket ships into outer space, or the necessity to take over the Middle East to satisfy our desperate yet insatiable need for oil.
Turns out, though, that much of the hysteria around these two inevitables has been just that. Fortunately, there are those among us who choose to focus on finding solutions, rather than simply feeding the hysteria. And those solutions are working. Today, in many marketplaces across the country, the US has more landfill disposal capacity than trash to fill it. The development of recycling technologies and re-use markets, and the collaboration between packagers, retailers and recyclers have made much of our already existing landfill space, once coveted like the gold at the end of a rainbow, now a challenge to fill. For proof, you need look no further than what’s happening at Waste Management www.wm.com, the largest garbage company in the world. For most of its history, WM’s strategy has focused, laser like, on building landfills and filling them with as much garbage as possible. Their landfills converted low-value farmland to huge-dollar garbage repositories, often with gross margins that likely rivaled Microsoft’s www.microsoft.com (at least in the good old days). Today, you won’t find WM’s CEO, David Steiner http://investors.wm.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=119743&p=irol-govBio&ID=205216 describing his company in terms normally associated with “garbage.” Instead, he will tell you that Waste Management plays a critical role in the product supply chain; that the company’s mission, and future success, is predicated on its ability to create value out of every ton of “garbage” they handle. And he actually means it.
And, in a hysteria turnaround of generational proportions, in 2011, the United States, for the first time in 62 years will be a net exporter (you read that right) of petroleum products http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203441704577068670488306242.html. Largely due to the development of hydraulic fracturing technology, http://www.energyfromshale.org/shale-extraction-process?gclid=CNfgm4Tz6KwCFQyFQAodz3TlKw oil and natural gas production in the US is soaring. “Proven” fossil fuel reserves have exploded and new discoveries, not only in the US but around the globe as well, are announced with increasing frequency. These discoveries have, in an amazingly short period of time, made the long-standing, gloomy predictions and accompanying hysteria about the inevitable and shocking speed with which the US would run out of petroleum look, today, almost silly and uninformed.
What’s caused us to accomplish these amazing and, until very recently, seemingly impossible supply turn-arounds? Human Innovation. Hysteria often stems from a misguided worry about what the future will bring. It worries about the complexity of solving a future problem and presumes, based apparently on the notion that present-day thinking won’t continue to evolve, that a solution is impossible. What it fails to consider, though, is that the present day thinking about solving a problem evolves as the urgency and incentive to solve the problem increases. While hysteria seeks an immediate solution, innovation weighs the need for a solution against both the realities and the possibilities. When the realities and the possibilities converge, that is when the time, resource, economic and innovation axis’ cross, as they have today in the US with landfill and petroleum supply, it’s amazing how the solutions that seemed so difficult to conceive not so long ago, seem so, well, timely today.
So what’s next? What are we hysterical about at the moment? Global Warming (aka Climate Change), Increasing CO2 in the Atmosphere, Our Supply of Clean Water, Feeding 7 Billion and quickly on our way to 10 Billion People, Coal-Fired Power Plants. The axis’ crossing for these problems will likely happen in my lifetime and Human Innovation will, I believe, come to the rescue over and over again!
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