A story: It's 1991 and I'm a 23-year-old intern with church groups using their pension funds to force meetings with big corporations. The CEO & board of Mobil (still just Mobil back then) is hosting a luncheon for these church folks to fend off their environmental proposal. ... https://twitter.com/ConSelfOwns/status/1359159228469039109

As an intern, I'm sitting at a table in the back with a bunch of guys who aren't executives for Mobil, just lowly research scientists. It's '91 and "Earth in the Balance" hasn't even been published yet, so I'm not thinking about climate as much as about just running out of oil.

"I'm 22," I say to the Mobil Scientists. "Years from now, in my '50s, I may want to have a cliched mid-life crisis where I buy a fancy little red sportscar. That'll be, like, the 2020s. Will there be any gas left to put in my little red mid-life-crisis sportscar?"

Dr. Mobil loves this question. "The short answer," he says, "is Yes. But the long answer is that 30 years from now we're going to need to have little red sportscars that run on something else." Then he lays out the long answer, a timeline of the next 30 years. ...

Dr. Mobil says there's another 10 years of untapped oil that we know of, plus maybe another 10-15 he's confident they'll discover. He figures increased use in the developing world with make that run out faster, but increased efficiency/conservation could balance that out.

Then he says there's other oil that they don't yet know how to get, but he figures they'll figure that out before I'm in my 50s. Dr. Mobil doesn't use the word, but he describes what would later become "fracking," which he thinks will buy us another decade or so of oil, maybe.

So, he says, yes, there will likely still be oil and gas for a little red sportscar when I'm in my 50s, and that he thinks probably they'll find other things he hasn't even imagined that could extend that supply for another decade after that. But, he says, that's not the point.

The point, Dr. Mobil says in 1991, is that this is the deadline -- that we've got 30-40 years tops to figure out What Comes Next. HIS job, he says, is to supply the energy to extend that deadline for other scientists to do THAT job, which he sees as far more important.

Dr. Mobil was confident in his ability to do his job, for Mobil (now ExxonMobil), finding new oil & new ways to extract that oil to extend that 30-maybe-40-year timeline. But he was clearly very, very worried about that other, more important scientific job.

If we didn't have a clear plan for What Comes Next while there was still some oil left in the ground, he said, then a mid-life crisis would be the least of my worries by the time I reached my 50s.

I'm sorry I don't remember Dr. Mobil's real name. I probably still have his business card in a box in the attic somewhere in this house, 3 blocks from where they're building the Mariner East pipeline Dr. Mobil that told me 30 years ago would arrive as a sign of desperation.

*"that Dr. Mobil" not "Dr. Mobil that" argh.