Up in North Dakota, wells are producing enough natural gas every day to heat a half million American homes for a day, which sounds like terrific news for an energy-thirsty nation. Unfortunately, the well-drillers are trying to find shale oil, so guess what we’re doing with the natural gas?

Flaring it. The gas is piped to the surface and burned off into the prairie sky, gone forever.

It’s like reaching into your wallet for a $10 bill and throwing away the fives that get in the way.

This is a big, rich country. And except for the people you supervise, it’s an ambitious, hard-working country. If only it were a well-organized country.

According to a New York Times story, it’s not economically feasible to capture this daily cornucopia of 100 million cubic feet of natural gas. “The oil companies … argue that they cannot afford to pay for pipelines and processing plants,” the article said, “until they actually drill oil wells and calculate how much gas will bubble out of the oil.”

It’s hard to argue with that unless you have experience at extracting oil and gas from an area covering 15,000 square miles, like the Bakken shale field. And, let’s be honest, you don’t even change the oil in your car. It’s just too much work.

So we’re left trusting in the magic of the free market.

A big nation doing big things is going to have its inefficiencies. When you want to fly from Des Moines west to Los Angeles, the best choice might involve flying east to Milwaukee first.

If you want to take an Amtrak train east to Chicago (actually, you don’t get to take it yourself, you just get to ride along; what a disappointment that was), you start by driving 60 miles south to Osceola.

It’s good that the lights in the freezers at the Hy-Vee supermarket in Altoona are dark when I enter the aisle, then flip on as I walk past – maybe when you walk past, too, although I would have no way of knowing that. But the lights on countless quiet streets and lonely rural intersections glow all night long, doing not much good and annoying the owls.

Also, many stores stay open every night with no motion sensors at all, lights blazing, serving only a handful of people who are trying to escape society’s notice. It would be much more energy-efficient to make them shop with the rest of us. Apes, Apple and the Apollo space program adapted to change, and the night people can, too.

We run our air conditioners hard enough to make our June, July and August offices feel a lot like January.

Now that it’s fall, farm truck and tractor engines idle for hours while the drivers wait for the combines or wait to unload at the grain elevator. Or sometimes they just get so caught up in what Rush has to say that they forget they’re farming.

In short, we’re wasting more energy than previous generations used to build the nation up.

It’s discouraging to think of all that fuel being sacrificed in North Dakota. We wonderful Iowans are cluttering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines, just trying to help the cause, and those dunderheads can’t think of a way to hang on to fossil fuel.

“This is not what you would expect a civilized, efficient society to do,” the Times quoted an energy expert as saying.

We’re relatively civilized, if you don’t count professional wrestling, but efficient? We heat houses that are twice as big as the ones we grew up in. We tool around in four-wheel-drive pickups in case we get the urge to buy a pool table and then drive through a ditch.

Efficiency? Kind of a hassle.

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com