Indiana Alumni Magazine
Natural Resources Won't Last Forever
By Maureen Harmon
As oil prices rose throughout 2005, political cartoons had a field day with Americans’ love of the SUV and our dwindling oil supply. The cartoons appeared in newspapers across the country and featured Americans — or George Bush himself — barreling down highways in our not-so-fuel-efficient Hummers. As today’s graduates drive off into the “real world,” oil consumption, really, is only the beginning of the environmental troubles they’ll face. Those SUVs we love? They, along with most cars out on the highways, have been releasing harmful emissions into our air for years; agricultural land is facing extinction due to overdevelopment and melting polar ice caps; and the freshwater supply is dwindling in some parts of the world and too polluted to use in other regions.
If graduates are worried about what to expect out there, at least they can be sure of one thing: the natural resources to which they’ve grown so accustomed aren’t going to last forever. And it will be up to the next generation to figure out how to run the world without them.
Where has All the Oil Gone?
The first U.S. oil well was drilled in 1859 — and even then, folks were warning of an oil shortage. Less than 20 years later, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C., a geologist in Pennsylvania predicted that only enough oil remained to “keep the nation’s kerosene lamps burning for four years.” Geologists and researchers of the past may not have been all that accurate in their predictions, but one thing they’ve all agreed on is that our oil supply will indeed give way at some point, though no one can say just when.
According to the United States Department of Energy, the U.S. uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day, and we dish out about $2 billion a week to run our cars, heat our homes, and pump electricity to our lights and computers — and it simply can’t continue indefinitely. Even drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, as President Bush has proposed, is only a short-term solution. To help today’s graduates solve some of these problems, the president announced in his State of the Union address in January the creation of the Advanced Energy Initiative — a program to increase research in home and auto power through the Department of Energy. Bush announced that by 2025 he hopes the United States will replace more than 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East. And how are researchers supposed to reach that goal?
The future, scientists and researchers predict, may be in hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells — technology that uses hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity — could solve a lot of the world’s environmental problems, but there are plenty of hurdles to overcome before that can happen, and the technology, says Bennet Brabson, IU professor emeritus of physics, is still at least 10 years away. Brabson predicts that throughout their careers, Indiana graduates will be charged with figuring out “clever” ways to make hydrogen using alternative fuels — sources like wind turbines, solar power, and hydroelectricity — to create fuel cells. Then they’ll have to help make this technology affordable. Right now it costs about $100,000 to make a hydrogen fuel cell capable of running a car. While the next generation of chemists and physicists work on that, engineers will be devising ways to store fuel cells for use in vehicles and homes. “Clearly you can’t carry a balloon around behind your car,” says Brabson.
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A Droughtful Future
Though the government seems to be focusing on power issues, our air and water quality will also need researchers’ and environmentalists’ attention in the years ahead. While the country’s air and water qualities are better than they were 40 years ago, the students beginning careers in, say, watershed management still have plenty of work to do.
Damage from the most extreme results of global warming — like the possibility of melting polar ice caps — is irreversible.
— Rafael Reuveny
According to Bill Jones, a professor in IU’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, only half of the world’s rivers and lakes are being monitored, and water quality over the next century will be critical. As countries like the United States and China continue to build up economically and physically, engineers and researchers will need to work to control runoff from highways, parking lots, and lawns, and to keep chemicals and pollutants from reaching the countries’ water supplies.
Still, this generation of professionals will be in a much better position than the generation before them, predicts Todd Royer, an assistant professor in SPEA. “With improved and more sophisticated methods,” he says, “we can now detect and quantify pollutants, such as pharmaceutical compounds, that previously could not be measured.”
And it’s not just quality of the water that this generation will have to monitor — it’s quantity as well. Even in the U.S., we’re likely to see water shortages in our freshwater supply. “This can already be seen in the southwestern U.S.,” says Royer, “where rapid development is outpacing water availability.”
Land Loss
While fresh water may become scarcer in some parts of the world, other regions — coastal areas especially — will see rising sea levels resulting in the loss of another precious resource: land. This loss of land has to do with the hot issue of global warming, experts say. Scientists and researchers like Randall Baker, a SPEA professor, insist the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gases — like carbon dioxide — released from power plants, cars, airplanes, and industry.
Advice for the next generation of scientists and policy makers: Work together.
— Randall Baker
If scientists are right, and Baker believes they are, global warming could be the biggest issue facing the next generation of workers. They’ll witness rising temperatures and weather phenomena to prove that global warming exists, says Baker. “The world’s climate seems to be going crazy,” he says. And as a result, the next generation will see weather extremes: rising sea levels, loss of land, more tornadoes, more hurricanes, and droughts. In 2005 alone, says Baker, the world witnessed three 100-year hurricanes — in a month. “At what point,” he asks, “do you decide that a hurricane is not entirely an act of God?”
Damage from the most extreme results of global warming — like the possibility of melting polar ice caps — is irreversible, says Rafael Reuveny, MS’96, PhD’97, associate professor in SPEA. He predicts that as these weather phenomena increase, this year’s graduates will find themselves working in areas like crisis management, evacuation planning, building defenses, and conflict resolution to combat civil uprising due to land loss and rising sea levels.
Expert Advice
With all of these problems on the horizon, Baker has this advice for the next generation of scientists and policy makers: Work together. That’s part of the reason IU chose to create the School of Public and Environmental Affairs in 1972. The idea, says Baker, was to help train policy makers who understand science and scientists who understand policy. No matter what side of the global warming debate today’s graduates come down on, the next generation of scientists, researchers, and policy makers will have to collaborate in order to get anything done, says Baker. After all, they have a lot of work to do. 
Maureen Harmon is a senior editor at The Penn Stater magazine and a freelance writer based in central Pennsylvania.