The Last Road Trip (I)

Four days from now I'll climb into my VW bug and head out on the road. This will be the last road trip.

Once upon a time, when gas was cheap and motel rooms were reasonably priced, I took to the road whenever the impulse struck, often just for the hell of it. Cruising along some remote two-lane blacktop (I never liked traveling the interstates) conferred a sense of freedom and independence. It fostered an illusion of power -- omnipotence, almost -- best expressed as, "I can go wherever I want, and do whatever I want, whenever I want."

Sure. Until the money runs out. Or more importantly, until you're out of gas. And we are.

Among the innumerable casualties of hurricane Katrina was our notion that gasoline is an infinite resource. But now we've breached the three-dollar barrier, the point at which many Americans find their formerly unlimited mobility curtailed. It's now extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a family of four with modest means to gas up the old Ford Explorer and go tooling off to visit Aunt Mary in Lubbock.

Among the people I've talked to over the past year about what's coming down the road at us, I haven't met more than a couple who are willing or able to imagine life without cheap oil and abundant, readily-available gasoline. It's all we've ever known. The magnitude of the changes, and the difficulty of the hardships we will soon be facing overwhelm our ability to deal with this highly unpleasant but unavoidable reality. Try telling people this, and they'll say, "Oh, technology will solve this problem," or "Oh, there's lots more oil in the world, they just haven't found it yet."

Consider: according to the most knowledgeable experts such as Ken Deffeyes of Princeton University, discovery of new sources of oil reached its climax in 1964 and has been steadily declining ever since. We are at the peak of oil production at the same time worldwide demand is rapidly increasing.

Consider: You can't burn technology.

Now, does the giant oil corporation -- ExxonMobilChevronTexacoValero -- know all this? You bet they do. Are they formulating policies for dealing with the chronic shortages and catastrophic price rises that are sure to come? You can bank on it.

But the proceedings of Dick Cheney's secret 2001 meeting with the czars of the US energy cartel have never seen the light of day. They've certainly got a plan, but they're not letting us in on it.

Meanwhile, can we expect at least a brief, temporary break in the price of gas at the pump? James Kunstler wrote a couple days ago, "The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again. In fact, having gone way above the psychological barrier of $3.00, the gasoline retailers may resist falling below that. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US since the late 1970s. There will be no new ones built now, despite the crunch on refined 'product.' Why? Because the oil companies understand that they are in a twilight industry and refineries represent huge investments in future activity, which the corporations correctly perceive will be shrinking as global oil production passes peak."

(More to come...)