The road outside the Impressionist's house is dug up. Again.
An army of bulldozers and mechanical diggers has torn up the tarmac and carted it away. Machines with names like
Bobcat move enormous piles of sand from one place to another for no apparent reason. Giant trucks arrive with loads of fresh steaming tarmac to replace the stuff they just took away. And huge road rollers create minor earthquakes as they hammer the surface down.
All this for a new electric cable under a few hundred metres of road.
The Impressionist wonders how much oil was burned for this tiny improvement, and how much is being wasted every day across the world as our machines get bigger and thirstier and more extravagantly used.
In March 1998 a
seminal article appeared in Scientific American - The End Of Cheap Oil by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherre was a sober, scientific assessment of the prospects for oil production.
They concluded that in 1998 there were around 850Gbo (1 Gbo = 1 thousand million barrels of oil) in known reserves with another 1000Gbo that could be practically extracted.
Using tested methods (so-called Hubbert curves), they estimated that world oil production will peak around 2010 and then decline to around 5Gbo per year in 2050 (about what it was in the early 1950s).
Back then, when Elvis was just a prince and children were encouraged to play outside and not get obese, holes in the road were dug by men with picks and shovels, not by machines.
Isn't it strange that people should spend lots of money to exercise in a gym when there are so many ways they could get the same effect for free and do something useful at the same time?
Today a van drew up with a load of wheelbarrows and, for a fleeting moment, The Impressionist fondly imagined that perhaps some good old-fashioned muscle power was going to replace the oil-guzzlers.
But they've gone now, the wheelbarrows - perhaps in the hole flattened by the earthquake machine.