The lights of Egypt glowed faintly on the southern Mediterranean horizon, but much closer shone the beacons of an offshore oil derrick, pumping black gold through the thick salt night.

 

So long as our ship, traversing the Red Sea, doesn't hit the offshore oil platforms that ubiquitously dot the horizon, mark the navigation charts and crowd the radar, they're of no concern, right?

 

Yet the Middle Eastern oil rigs do concern me, the same way a crack handshake in the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Farmington and Laurel does.

 

The sentiment doesn't arise after spotting an oil pump in Pennsylvania, or a field of them in Texas. The Med rigs reminded me of Eastern Syria - it's the Middle East - where those pump fill barrels, something like 50 percent of the world’s supply of them.

 

It feels like that scene in Dune, the Frank Herbert classic sci-fi thriller, where Paul the hero realizes that the massive desert sand worms are the source of the spice which allows his civilization to fold time and space, traveling light years in the blink of an eye.

 

The oil is the energy that helps us travel. The oil is life itself. We eat the oil (the gas that powers the tractors, the phosphate fertilizers which feed the crops, the gas for the trucks to deliver the food to market, etc).

 

So it’s hard not to think about oil and diesel and resources, with Egyptians reminding you, Amrikkiyy, that Bush started a war in Iraq. And on board Maverick II, I have literally been up to my ankles in diesel.

 

While refueling in Port Said, we spilled about 50 gallons of diesel while filling up off the bunker barge. Luckily for us, there is squat for environmental regulations in Egypt, because if that happened in Horta, we’d be paying a $100,000 fine.

 

But that spill represents a tiny fraction of the oil that Maverick II will use by the end of this trip.

 

From Florida to Thailand, halfway around the world, Maverick II will have consumed a minimum of 40,000 gallons of diesel. That’s not counting the return to the Mediterranean.

 

Nor does it account for the oil usage of the $2.2 million refit, where crew and workers drove how many miles around south Florida to make the boat up to the owners’ specifications.

 

A thumbnail calculation equates $1 to one liter of oil. So this boat has used up more than its fair share of energy resources.

 

To look at the pick-up truck bed crammed, carrying 30 Egyptian workers, I imagine it would take the average Egyptian three lifetimes to use that much oil.

 

 

The mediocre American energy hog who uses maybe 1,500 gallons of petroleum annually  (to heat his house, to drive his car, to have the electricity for the computer, television, etc.) would need 25 to 30 years to use the oil that Maverick II is using in one year.

 

So how am I to respond when the owner tells me he relishes the thought of gas hitting $5 a gallon so Americans can no longer use their guzzling SUVs? Well, if I'm Gov. Jodi Rell, my energy efficiency website says Americans can keep their SUVs and still conserve energy. 

 

Before I react, I must admit I benefit from this energy gluttony – would I be in Egypt or Oman otherwise? Thus I shut my trap. The boss' wife may gently chide him, but she’ll never call him a hypocrite.

 

And I wonder what gives him – and by extension his economic class - the right to purchase so much petroleum? And what makes it so acceptable in America to gobble oil?

 

Aside from having the money, is it a narcissism? Or a pathology like obsessive-compulsive hording that allows owners to justify beyond-conspicuous consumption?

 

Or is it the feeling that they have done something to benefit the world – like sell pesticides to Arab governments that prevented millions of pilgrims on the Hajj from contracting mosquito-borne illnesses? Or like liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein?

 

I can’t say for sure, but when I consider that some 11,000 mega-yachts like Maverick II exist today, with an estimated 5,000 meters more in construction as we speak, I wonder why rich people, or Americans in general, deserve the spoils.

 

About 10 years ago Maverick II was considered large. Today, it is average. The ostentatious, like Paul Allen’s monstrous Octopus, which at 450 feet long, must gobble 10 times a day the oil we do. The modest, like the tinier 65-foot sailboats, can't go through five gallons of diesel a day.

 

In this industry, owners shield their assets through front companies in the UK’s Guernsey Islands or in the Cayman Islands, and wealth hides its consumption from scrutiny.

 

Yet mass media exalts the mega-rich, whether tabloids report on P. Diddy chartering a boat in Cannes for $250,000 a week, or old Robin Leach’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” fawns over Ivana Trump's yacht.

 

The stories about Ivana Trump and her vessel management make legends in this industry, and Robin would be loathe to report her hysterical antics and life-threatening decisions. Would we envy the wealthy if we knew their petulant proclivities?

 

We know that fossil fuels are killing the planet, yet the best we can do is a website from Gov. Rell and a lousy gas mileage bill from Congress.

 

Perhaps if we looked at wealth and our consumption of resources differently, not as something to be idolized, but something to be questioned, in light of the disease that it causes on the planet, we could move more efficiently, quicker.

 

In this second gilded age, where the gap between rich and poor grows daily, and with oil resources scarce, we need to examine how we can hold this consumption accountable.

 

Is it illness on our part? I struggle daily with my need for job satisfaction and my physical needs like rent and food. And when I see the oil derricks pumping away as we motor on by, I can't help but think we have to do more, and gird ourselves for sacrifice.