is there hope

Relics of our monetary and fiscal cycles are all around us.

Abandoned buildings like this one aren’t isolated cases, they’re in every city.

I’m not sure who pushed the first domino, oil & gas or construction, but both industries tell a similar story.

In O&G, you hear terms like green field, brown field, in-fill development, injector, producer, storage, and geothermal.

In construction and development, the categories shift: single-family, multi-family, commercial, industrial, mixed-use, high-rise.

The lists go on.

My point is simple: in under a minute, I can map out parallels between the two industries.

Back in 2011–2012, I wrote a white paper on the global Plug & Abandonment market. It was tied to a strategy course I was taking at Rice Business. I haven’t written a white paper on construction (yet), but the similarities are striking.

In both industries, it’s almost always easier—and cheaper—to build something new than to fix or repurpose what already exists.

And maybe that points to something deeper.

Maybe humans are wired to create and destroy because we need the work.

Take depreciation.

It’s a brilliant accounting concept—a way to quantify the “using up” of physical assets. It shows up on income statements, shifts balance sheets, shapes cash flow.

Yet at the end of the day, it’s a fugazi. It exists on paper, accepted by GAAP, but it evaporates when you sell the asset.

When I finally dug deep into accounting (shoutout to Karen Nelson for her patience with my antics), I learned to see the world differently.

I took many more courses and read 100's of books from financial statement analysis, M&A, commercial real estate finance and law—and I began to see the numbers behind the physical.

I learned the rules of the game.

Here’s the cycle: we build, we drill, we “use up,” and then we abandon.

But is there not a better way?

This isn’t a condemnation of either industry. Quite the opposite. It's a call to actions, there is plenty of work that needs to be done.

The question is: where is the money?

Where will the funding come from to permanently abandon millions of non-producing wells? Who will pay to demolish or repurpose the abandoned factories, buildings, and houses scattered across the world?

Didn’t someone “account” for this along the way?

I’ll admit, I smile when I fire up my old HP12C calculator and punch in the numbers. There are a lot of zeros left of the decimal point.

But here’s the hopeful truth: the very problems we see, abandoned wells, empty buildings, forgotten infrastructure, are also opportunities.

Every challenge hides a project, every project hides a paycheck, and every paycheck represents progress.

Human progress is a perpetual money-printing machine. The opportunities are real, the needs are massive, and the solutions will take builders, dreamers, and problem-solvers.

So yes, there is hope. More than hope. There is work, there is opportunity, and there is a future to build.