Buckminster FullOfStuff

Thanks to ~DS~ for alerting me to the fact that Kevin "The Oil" Drum decided to do a series of posts on Peak Oil. The major blogs such as Drum's and DailyKos have a short half-life for commenting and I got lucky in picking up a few tidbits from the comments sections from those sites.

Over thirty years ago ... Buckminster Fuller sold best seller books written about humanity's necessary transition to renewable energy resources if it is to survive and prosper. He predicted that, if we didn't do any planning, we would end up having energy wars for the legitimate fear that there "wouldn't be enough (fossil fuel energy) to go around." Damn. That goggle-eyed chrome dome was right all along. But Bush doesn't read...

...on the other hand, Bush isn't the only one who failed us. We can now see that corporate America was never interested in long-term planning; rather, they were interested in the forces of the market place. In other words, we fell flat on our stewardship role, and now we'll have to pay for playing the market. We're going to come up way short in manufacturing an alternative energy supply, and too many of us will suffer for our negligence.

I didn't realize that Buckminister Fuller had such a big hand in instructing or pontificating (depending on your POV) on resource depletion during the 1970's -- many have quoted his famous advice on "doing more with less". It now makes sense that Richard Smalley, inventor of the BuckminsterFullerene material and "BuckyBall" nano-structures, got on such an energy issue kick in the last few years. Considering that Smalley probably read everything Fuller had written, it should come as no surprise how many of Fuller's insights bubbled to the surface.