In the 1920s, in southern US states like California and Florida, it wasn't uncommon to see solar water heaters on the roofs of homes. Not that there were a lot of people eager to be green back then, it was simply an inexpensive way to heat water.

Then natural gas wells were drilled, and pipes were laid, and new homes were built with the pipes running right up into the hot water heaters. And the rooftop water heaters vanished.

Why?

Because natural gas was cheaper? Of course not. How could anything you pay for be cheaper than free sunlight? But natural gas was more efficient, and it didn't require home builders to put up the rooftop heaters, and roofs probably looked a bit prettier without pipes running across them.

Finally, gas is cheap. Or it was.

Someday, the gas will run out. There's a finite amount of natural gas buried in the ground. Ditto for oil.

Whether we're near or far from peak oil (or whether we passed it a few years back), every drop of hydrocarbons sucked from the ground is one less we'll have in the future.

Almost everything we use is made from non-renewable resources, or from resources that are being exploited faster than they can naturally replenish.

When we eat more tuna year after year, when we cut down more trees than are planted, when we mine minerals and then bury them again in landfills, we're cheating our future. We're writing bad cheques for the whole economy.

I've started thinking of this as false abundance. Our car culture is the best example of it. Not only do we run our cars on petroleum, but significant parts of our autos, from tires to interiors, are made of oil, and we drive on roads paved with tar.

If we had no access to non-renewable resources like oil, would cars have ever taken off? Would we have eight-lane highways, Detroit and Windsor, the Saudi dynasty?

This false abundance even extends to things that we think of as being environmentally friendly. My bike is made with rubber tires, plastic tubes, and an aluminum frame. Do you know how much electricity it takes to smelt aluminum? How much more would I have to pay for my bike if all the power and components had come from renewable sources?

Look around at your own life, and ask yourself how much your possessions and lifestyle would cost if you couldn't deplete the natural world any faster than it could be restored.

If we tried to switch straight to that system, our entire society would crash and burn in short order. But aside from the mealy-mouthed international declarations that we should cut our carbon usage, governments are doing nothing to move us towards the more stable world.

Make no mistake, if we don't wean ourselves off non-renewables, we will run out and be unprepared. Remember the parable about the ant and the grasshopper? How about six to eight billion grasshoppers, and no ants to mooch off? That's where we're heading sometime in the next few years. We can delay it, but only a complete about face will prevent it.

It's ironic that here in Canada, the party that tries hardest to suck up to the oil industry, the Conservatives, is also the party that is supposedly the most fiscally conservative.

Every time we burn off a tank of gas, we're contributing to a future deficit. We don't know the final price tag. We don't know when the bill will come due.

But we know it's coming. We live in the age of false abundance. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Visit Matthew Claxton's blog, Evolving Langley, at http://tiny.cc/A0D3W at www.langleyadvance.com