How Much for that Prius?

According to scholar Michael Klare - the guy who tried to tally the civilian death toll from American bombing at the beginning of the Iraq war - a new book by banker and oil-industry expert Matthew Simmons convincingly argues that the end of the era of (relatively) cheap petroleum is upon us. In Simmons' words:

The ‘twilight' of Saudi Arabian oil envisioned in this book is not a remote fantasy. Ninety percent of all the oil that Saudi Arabia has ever produced has come from seven giant fields. All have now matured and grown old, but they still continue to provide around 90 percent of current Saudi oil output...High-volume production at these key fields...has been maintained for decades [but soon] steep production declines are almost inevitable.

I think Klare overstates the impact of expensive or unavailable oil on the world economy. If the history of technoscientific innovation in the 20th century showed anything, it's that humans (or, rather, the capitalist institutions we endow with so much social and economic power) are very, very good at coming up with ways to surmount seemingly-insurmountable technical and scientific obstacles. The reliance on petrochemicals in agriculture is one example: fertilizers derived from oil resolved many problems presented by insufficient manure (like its stench, its inefficiency, and its unhealthiness). As oil's availability wanes and its price waxes, it is likely that scientists, engineers, and laypeople will find innumerable ways to survive and prosper without oil.

Still, Cassandra was right, and Klare is probably right, too, about other issues. The U.S. is singularly ill-equipped to deal with increasingly expensive and rare oil, especially since the good-oil boys in the White House have worked hard to ensure that our whole foreign policy is predicated on controlling Middle Eastern oil. Klare quotes the Department of Energy as claiming - in a best-case scenario - that based on current estimates, the U.S. government "would expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century." That's a thin reed, I think: slicing our century into thirds, we're only about 25 years away from the beginning of the decline. And, yes, technological innovation in alternative energy sources may occur rapidly even before then. But Lord: we're closer to that best-case peak, and the slide on the other side, than we are to birth of civilian nuclear energy after World War II, and about as far from it now as we are from the OPEC oil shocks of the early 1970s. In other words, put your name on the list for a Prius now.