Summer Solstice occurs on the year’s longest day.  It is the beginning of summer and has become an occasion for celebration since ancient times.  Long before the advent of organized religion, pagans gathered during Summer Solstice for feasting and the exchange of legend and lore.

Revels began on Solstice Eve with the lighting of a giant bonfire.  Remaining awake all night, revelers celebrated by chanting, dancing, and playing percussion instruments as they awaited first light of Summer Solstice’s dawn.

Ancient pagans believed in magic and felt the two yearly solstices provided portals to a magical realm.  Because of their beliefs in magic, Summer Solstice became a time for offering gifts to the spirits and exchanging presents with each other.  It was considered a highly mystical date when the prospect of physical and mental rebirth was high.

Voodoo is the New World result of the complex melding of African religion and European Catholicism.  Marie Laveau, the most famous voodoo priestesses in New Orleans, led frenzied revels on the banks of St. Johns Bayou on St. John’s Eve, a date that celebrates St. John the Baptist and loosely coincides with the Summer Solstice.

In Panther Stalking, my novel in progress, protagonist Buck McDivit investigates a pagan commune inhabited only by females.  Buck becomes enamored with Rima, the commune’s beautiful high priestess.  A pivotal moment in the plot occurs when he joins Rima and the inhabitants of the commune in a mystical and almost unbelievable Solstice’s Eve celebration.

http://www.EricWilder.com

During the years following the eighties oil bust there was a saying in Oklahoma.  “Last one to leave the State turn out the lights.”  The words were anything but hyperbole.  Oil dominated the state’s industry in the eighties and the oil bust all but wiped it out.

Before the bust, I remember stopping on the side of the road one night in Garfield County and counting seventeen drilling rigs.  Seventeen-hundred rigs were drilling onshore and offshore United States.  The increased drilling activity managed to stem the steep decline in crude oil and natural gas, at least for a few years.

Oil wasn’t the only industry to suffer during the eighties bust.  Banking, precipitated by the downfall of Penn Square Bank, suffered dearly.  For a while, a bank a day was closed in Oklahoma.  I personally banked at five different banks that all went under.  The FDIC had hundreds of employees in the State.  They not only managed to single-handedly decimate Oklahoma’s banking industry, they also had a large hand in crushing the local real estate industry.  As so often happens, Government intervention exacerbated the problem instead of alleviating it.

When the price of oil dropped to less than $10 a barrel, rig owners began selling their rigs for scrap.  Stripper wells, wells that produce less than 10 BOPD, were plugged because it cost more to operate them than they made every month.  Countless thousands of stripper wells, all still capable of producing oil and gas, were plugged and the production pipe shot off, pulled and sold for scrap – a valuable United States resource lost forever.

Oklahoma survived because it turned to other things such as computers, electronics and technology.  Today, the worst economy during the eighties is now the best economy of 2008.  Oklahoma sucked in its over inflated gut, re-cinched its belt and learned how to survive.

The economy of oil and gas has again returned to Oklahoma, fueled by $13 MCF natural gas and $130 oil.  The state receives a gross production tax from every MCF and BO, a tax not levied on any other industry – a tax they continued to levy even when oil was $10 a barrel.

Oklahoma is doing fine but, like all the other states, facing an insidious problem.  There isn’t enough crude oil left to supply the world’s ever growing demand.  Unlike the eighties we can’t just turn the oil tap to a higher notch.  It is already wide open.  This is affecting the economy and there are no simple solutions to the problem.

The place to start is energy conservation which we are actively doing by dramatically cutting back on our driving habits.  We consume about twenty-six million barrels of oil every day in the U.S., half of that amount in the form of gasoline.  Yes we are cutting back on our consumption but unfortunately many rapidly developing nations like China, India and Pakistan are sucking up what we don’t use.

It was once common to hear our politicians say that we have an endless supply of natural gas in this country.  This is yet another lie.  While the energy industry is presently stemming the tide of decline by developing shale gas such as the Barnett, Woodford and Haynesville, we are still only twenty years away from where we are now with respect to domestic oil production.

There is presently a dramatic price differential between crude oil and natural gas when comparing BTU to BTU.  If they were equal, natural gas would be trading for around $20 per MCF instead of $13 per MCF, the present market value.  The U.S. should take advantage of this price discrepancy by immediately converting all government vehicles to run on natural gas.  This could easily cut our dependence on foreign oil by several million barrels a day.  Then, until demand catches up with supply, the result would be lower oil (and thus gasoline) prices.

This is a short term fix but it would give us a little breathing room to develop alternative forms of energy.  My opinion, as horrible as it sounds, is to begin building more nuclear reactors for our primary energy needs and develop electrical or hydrogen powered vehicles that are infinitely more energy efficient than our present fleet.

Is it true that gross ignorance in the eighties is at least partially responsible for today’s very frightening energy crisis?  Yes!  I don’t often get on my soapbox but the country is today in a dire energy crisis and unlike the seventies this one is very real.  We all must quit pointing the finger of blame and act responsibly to correct the situation because the alternative is very dark indeed.

http://www.EricWilder.com