Road Trip to the Apocalypse

Chronicle of Doom Fortold, Chapter XX?

Energy Cassandra's have been warning us about this for decades, but now it's here. Oil is no longer cheap, and the long term is likely to get worse. Nelson D. Schwartz has a look at the history in today's New York Times. Like many of our recent disasters (9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Bush tax cuts) this is a calamity that those with minds could see coming for millions, er, trillions of vehicle miles.

Schwartz has some quotes:

“Much of what we’re seeing today could have been prevented or ameliorated had we chosen to act differently,” says Pete V. Domenici, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a 36-year veteran of the Senate. “It was a bipartisan failure to act.”

Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the country’s biggest automobile retailer, is even more blunt. “It was totally preventable,” he says, anger creeping into his affable car-salesman’s pitch.

I will buy the bipartisan failure, but the principal blame goes to the Bush administration, and to the idiots who elected it. Despite plenty of warning, Americans chose to live in a dream world where God would always provide them as much oil as they needed, and never mind the fact that the people who stood to gain the most from high priced oil were running the country.

For big oil, and its (mostly) Republican minions, current prices are a fluke, caused by our failure to drain the last drop of our reserves or maybe by mysterious speculators. Pretty clearly, the markets are unconvinced.

I think that it's pretty unlikely that we really are at peak oil, and even more dubious that oil is likely to rise a whole lot more. Barring disaster (e.g., "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"), oil is likely to fall in response to world wide recession and a gradual cranking up of supplies. Perhaps it will even reach $60/bbl. again. If so, we will have another chance to blow our opportunity to do something about it.

Energy conservation is the most obvious answer, and that is unlikely to happen without higher taxes on its use. No one will dare touch that unless energy prices suddenly decline, but Americans really do need to move beyond the culture of immediate gratification.