Helium Balloons and Blimps Should be Banned.

I am not suggesting that countries need to have communist or dictatorship regimes in order to take an active interest in conserving non-renewable resources. All developed countries, regardless of their political structure, already have laws addressing protection, conservation, and management of natural resources. The United Nations Environmental Program defines sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Any laws with respect to helium conservation would be formulated under this doctrine. As for helium production, there are really only a handful of countries involved. Some 78% comes from the United States, with the remainder coming from Algeria, Russia, Poland, and Qatar; as the U.S. has the lion's share of the resource, U.S. law would have the most impact. What would be the most effective legal approach? Arresting people caught with helium balloons? ~ Probably not. But regulating the industry, managing suppliers, controlling the market, basically, formulating laws with an eye toward making this precious gas less available to frivolous uses would be the way to go. Right now for instance, you can go to any Walmart and buy a tank of helium for party balloons for about $50 USD, this tank will fill around 50 balloon at a cost of $1 USD ea. Robert Richardson, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1996, makes the argument that a helium balloon should cost closer to $110 USD ea. to more accurately reflect that actual scarcity of the gas. The trouble with leaving it to the free market is, it doesn't always get things right. Currently the market niches are being filled, 180 million standard cubic meters of helium are being harvested per year, so the free market will behave largely as if this will continue to occur in perpetuity, which it definitely won't. Futures markets aren't looking far enough into the future to recognize the true scarcity of the resource, so it could be argued that the helium markets are artificially cheap due to the characteristic short-term considerations of the free-market. To digress a bit, I'll offer one correction to your argument. You mentioned hot air balloons as part of this discussion. Hot air balloons do not work on helium, they work on 'hot air', natural gases found in the troposphere that is composed of roughly 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% argon. These gases are usually heated by a propane burner in a hot-air balloon, and because of the physics of fluid dynamics these hot 'air' gases become lighter than the surrounding gases giving the balloon buoyancy. The issue with blimps is that they are primarily used for advertising, which is frivolous considering that there are comparable alternatives available. One blimp/zeppelin takes anywhere from 190,700 to 494,000 cubic feet of helium, the equivalent of 629.5k - 1.63 million 10 inch helium balloons. - There are some uses for blimps other than advertising that could be more appropriate in the areas of science and national defense, but these applications would need to be carefully considered if there are viable alternatives available. I understand that people may want to ride in a blimp, but again, there are other comparable alternatives such as hot air balloons and many other ways to get airborne that don't involve wasting helium. Consider this however, at your age its a real possibility that at some future date when you may need an MRI scan and you may not be able to get one; at that time, you could look back and wonder about the irresponsible decisions that led to a very real shortage of an irreplaceable natural resource.