For about 100 years (except for a few spikes in the 70s and 80s), oil cost about $20/barrel. One hundred years!

What’s happened to the price of oil lately is significant. And since oil is a finite resource, the price will likely keep on rising.

In 2002, everything was fine. And then in 2003, 2004, 2005 parents started telling their kids: “Hey, go turn off the lights.”

If the price of oil was just tracking inflation, it would be about $35/barrel right now. Instead, it’s $108/barrel.

We could almost use this type of a graph as a consumer price index for Hawai‘i. If I’d had this information before, I wouldn’t have needed to go to the Peak Oil conference to figure out what was going to happen.

This graph, which I prepared, predicts what your life will be like in the future. You can look at it and see, depending on how closely you’re tied to the electric grid and how much you drive your car, the direction in which your life will go.

We are lucky, though, to have an indigeous resource available to us here in Hawai‘i. Geothermal – which is low-cost, a proven technology and environmentally benign – is a gift that can help take care of all of us.