Oil prices falling — will IQs follow?

Gasoline at $5, $6, $10 a gallon over the next two years would have been a severe mercy for the United States. It would have forced changes that will eventually be essential: more transit and rail passenger service, a return to our core cities, an urgency to raise fuel economy standards and develop alternatives. At last suburban and exurban living would be properly priced and costly, and the enterprise to retrofit savable suburbia to transit could begin. Foot-dragging on reducing greenhouse gases would have been similarly eliminated.

I don’t think it will go down that way. Oil prices have been dropping in recent days, as I long predicted they would. The decline is because the nation that uses a quarter of the world’s petroleum is seen heading into a nasty recession, which will cut world demand. So prices will drop, and soon we can expect some to start saying the worst is over and we can get back to driving SUVs and other self-destructive behavior.

(I think of a story in today’s Arizona Republic about Lake Powell "recovering," and the ‘Zonies thinking "happy days are here again!" even though their water crisis is unabated — although a State Secret).

Yet the fundamentals haven’t changed. World oil production has either reached peak or will do so in a few years. That means half of this one-time resource will have been extracted and burned off — and it was the easy half, the cheap half. So the remainder will be more costly, and getting it will be more geopolitically destabilizing. So oil will fall a little, then rise more the next time; retreat a bit again and resume its upward climb. The major oil companies and oil exporting nations (which control most of the oil) know this. Most Americans still don’t.

It may be a pipe dream that any magnitude of crisis would prompt an intelligent response from today’s America. If the polling on McCain’s "drill, drill, drill!" is to be believed, a majority of Americans would happily defile the coastline on the false promise that they can keep making long individual trips in personal vehicles. We are, as de Tocqueville observed 170 years ago, "a restless people." I can imagine many Americans being roused from their television torpor, not by torture as national policy or lies that led to war or global warming, but by the idea that they couldn’t continue living in a cul-de-sac with five vehicles 100 miles from work. Aux barricades!

It doesn’t help that the corporate media refused to really cover Obama’s in-depth energy plan, unveiled yesterday in Michigan. But McCain offers a simple answer: Drill! It won’t work. We don’t have enough oil offshore to offset the continued global decline, and it would be a decade before it came onto the world market. Note, the world market. Thus, it would likely do little to lower gasoline prices here even then. The oil companies know this — that’s why they’re not using the 68 million acres of leases they already have.

And if it did work — if peak oil were a myth and we really had all the oil we’d ever need, and at low prices, what then? Just keep burning it, raising global temperatures and degrading local quality of life, and just "adapt." Leave the problem for future generations, as we are doing with so much else? Global warming = shrug.

Is this America?

History tells us that Americans never went for radicalism, whether in the labor turmoil of the Gilded Age or in the worst part of the Depression, when intelligent people believed capitalism was hopelessly broken. This is a country of middle ways generally. Yet the GOP over the past 25 years has found a way to sell an increasingly radical agenda, and most people sit mute. Reagan breaking the air controllers strike was an unfortunate event, but it had precedent. Bush and Cheney enshrining torture as national policy is unprecedented. Thus has the tent become inhabited by the camel. So maybe Americans can abide the radical, as long as they get to keep their cars and stuff.

The challenges of global warming and diminishing resources will require national responses we have only seen in three major wars. The nation may not be up for it. It would be a challenge for any civilization that has enshrined individualism while gutting its former similar commitment to personal responsibility and community.

Yet the gasoline runup of recent years has been an early wakeup. An event timed such that we could have begun the efforts to make the transition to different choices in transportation (not "forcing you out of your car," as the right would have it) and living; providing incentives for green energy that works, etc. Things that would have made the eventual reckoning — slow moving though it may be — much less painful. Even that may prove too difficult for us.