DDT. Nuclear Power. High voltage power lines. Global warming. Global cooling. The energy crisis of the 1970s. Silicone breast implants. Nuclear winter. Avian flu. Irradiated food. Genetically modified food. Global starvation due to "excess" population. Looming Christian theocracy. The end of the universe due to the Large Hadron Collider. The impending Bush Coup And Dictatorship. The list of "crises" brought to us by the media — and certain politicians and celebrities — seems almost endless.

Of course, there are some things which could be (or are already) a serious problem: creeping Islamic extremism; the possibility of an asteroid strike; the dangers of a nuclear Iran, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) — or both; an impossible national debt and vast government overspending; declining immunization rates; historical illiteracy... — these, being actual problems, will receive almost no attention.

Here's a looming crisis which *I* find alarming, because it's so preventable and stupid, and will have such drastic effects on future generations:

Scientists have warned that the world's most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle.

The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas - by far the biggest store of helium in the world - must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price.

Besides toy balloons, what is helium used for? Oh, nothing important...

The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky.

Helium is made either by the nuclear fusion process of the Sun, or by the slow and steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock, which accounts for all of the Earth's store of the gas. There is no way of manufacturing it artificially, and practically all of the world's reserves have been derived as a by-product from the extraction of natural gas, mostly in the giant oil- and gasfields of the American South-west, which historically have had the highest helium concentrations.

Liquid helium is critical for cooling cooling infrared detectors, nuclear reactors and the machinery of wind tunnels. The space industry uses it in sensitive satellite equipment and spacecraft, and Nasa uses helium in huge quantities to purge the potentially explosive fuel from its rockets.

In the form of its isotope helium-3, helium is also crucial for research into the next generation of clean, waste-free nuclear reactors powered by nuclear fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the Sun.

This sounds like a very serious problem, and I'm not prone to alarmism. If you think I'm wrong, correct me. Otherwise, I'll forward this to people, and am planning to write or call my congresscritters about it.

I don't expect this to get much attention from the media: they prefer to cover crises which seem to require a governmental solution, not ones created by it.