Word: run
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...run out? And why is that unfortunate? After all, these fuels provide nearly 80% of the energy humans use to keep warm, to light buildings and run computers, to power the cars that get us around, the tractors that plant food, the hospitals that serve our sick. If these fuels were to vanish tomorrow, worldwide chaos would follow and humans would die in the hundreds of millions...
...Will we run out of gas?"--a question we began asking during the oil shocks of the 1970s--is now the wrong question. The earth's supply of carbon-based fuels will last a long time. But if humans burn anywhere near that much carbon, we'll burn up the planet, or at least our place...
Change won't be easy. But how we respond will help answer the metaphorical meaning of "Will we run out of gas?" That is, will our species fizzle out in the coming century, a victim of its own appetites and lethargy? Or will we take action and earn a longer stay on this beautiful planet...
There are limits, of course, to how many lives you can give a pile of debris. In the long run, we have to reduce the amount of material we use in the first place. Some progress is being made--aluminum cans and plastic soda bottles have become thinner over the years, for example--but more sweeping reductions will require a whole new kind of manufacturing process...
...tide is running back toward Malthus. We are emerging from a 10,000-year vacation from nature still not fully realizing that our own survival hinges on reducing the damage we do to Earth's natural systems. We may not drive ourselves to the complete oblivion of biological extinction, but I fear that the Malthusian specters of famine, warfare and disease will rise in the comparatively short run (the next few centuries), coupled with an accelerating loss of human cultural diversity and, ultimately, quality of life...