Ben Stein gets peak oil. Kinda.

Rod, you have an astounding affinity for chiliasm.

Eventually, of course, one who continually predicts disaster will probably be right eventually.

Meanwhile, enjoy each apocalyptic frisson, until, the event of Rapture occurring, your car is unmanned.

It would take years to enact, and then only get only a few years worth of oil. Barely enough to use to buy time to find an alternative.

I do love that deliberately meaningless (but deceptively rosy) number the Government put out about how long our domestic oil would last.

60 years for 60 million cars. (Though, first off, they don't say what kind of cars, how much driving.. There's a difference between an SUV driving twenty miles a day, and a compact car driving 20 miles a week..)

Sounds great... if there weren'y 250 million cars on the road.

Oops, that puts the tally down to about 15 years.

If oil were only used for CARS. Instead of such trivia as.. lights, heat, running our electronics or in the manufacture of thousands of items from plastics to cosmetics. Or other forms of transport, such as ships, or planes. Cars only account for 65 percent of oil usage.

And that brings the tally down to less than 10 years.

And assuming the rate of usage doesn't chang... oops, well, it did go up about a million barrels a DAY just recently, from 20 to 21 million.

So, the number, even if accurate, is meaningless when it comes to what we use oil for, and therefore, how long it will really last.

I suppose we 'peakniks' - those who have been actively discussing peak oil for a few years now - should be grateful that peak oil has finally entered the main stream media, of which Ben Stein is a part. My fear now is that peak oil will be discussed in the same highly polarized, partisan fashion that Ben Stein's intelligent design movie is discussed.

In other words, regardless of how much oil is in the ground, how much it costs and why, the hapless American public will get whip-sawed into bewildered, paralyzing indifference by the opposing sides of the peak oil debate. And as the cornucopians and the doomers duke it out, Rome will surely burn.

Mr. Dreher, the heart of your "problem", is that you self-identify with Christianity - a philosophy of life that carries great hope for now and eternity.

There's no "glass half-empty" philosophical choice to be made for followers of Christ, who said, "Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden...my yoke is easy and my burden is light." The rewards of serving him far outweigh the negatives.

Overt and overarching pessimism is best left to the agnostics.

Overt and overarching pessimism is best left to the agnostics.

Christian hope is not the same as pollyannaism either, though.

If Grumpy old man would only simplify his theological insults, we might concede what we are all guilty of -- not anti semitic ethnic slurs, as he is -- but sin, the transgression of "vanquishing" the earth under rights of private property rather stewarding Creation as a leasehold obligation to its Creator (who is keeping the tab even if folks don't want to know how far their account balance is in arrears).

We're all members of the tribe of Hubris, some know it and repent, again and agian if necessary, and some like Grumpy Old Man prefer to transgress further be pointing out the deficits of others, depleting any credit in the deposit of faith held on their own account : WHEN YOU"RE IN A HOLE STOP DIGGIN!

Now to the point of Christian hope and joy (pessimism vs optimism) this involves a third dimension to "right" and "wrong" its both/and as Oscar wilde pithily remarked "Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future" we are not held captive by the evil our sin has mired us in - we can "Get up and go" as Pope JPII enjoined us to do!

There is another Christian virtue which applies here: gifts of the spirit work upon all sides of the equation (in our own hearts'n'minds and those of our adversaries) or expressed another way, the holy spirit operates "reciprocally"

"we need a new moon-shot mentality here"

doesn't have to mean we apply our vast resources of intellectual ingenuity to "DIG THE HOLE DEEPER"
it could also mean
"WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS PILE DIRT OF DIRT WE ACQUIRED?
in other words our sins inform our conscience via compunction - how do we avoid the sin of overconsumption ?

We create newer, faster, better, cheaper ways to use less for the same results (I have mentioned the Faktor Vier book before but I'll mention it again here, halving resource consumption and doubling resource efficiency can create EXPONENTIAL returns on investment (assuming the Government isn't usurping our liberty and debasing the coin of the realm and unfortunately since that has been the case for the past century, we're likely to need a retraining camp to get past that log in our own eyes.)

Rod, you must read this column from today's WaPo:
http://tinyurl.com/5n8yjx

I've loved Ben Stein for years, but he's dead wrong about the solution being to exploit America for all oil possible. It would only delay the inevitable, making our coastlines hideous in the process.

Call me Chicken Little, but James Howard Kunstler gets it.

You should also read the AP news article "Energy fears looming, new survivalists prepare." (Not linking due to posts possibly disappearing.)

Glad that Ben recognizes that the peak oil theory may indeed be right, and that we need to do something in response. But his proposed response ought to embarrass any true conservative. Consider his statement "Make oil out of coal". Go talk to the farmers and ranchers (almost all of them conservatives) who live in areas where coal is stripmined in the West and where Stein's pet technology is being pushed. They have been fighting this idea for years, because it destroys the land (stripmining for coal), befouls the air and water and disrupts agricultural economies.

A true conservative should also recognize that "moon-shot" programs (read: huge subsidies from the taxpayer) are not needed to solve every problem. Instead of throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at high-tech fixes, a true conservative should understand that the first response should be to conserve (duh!). Most of the country has made little attempt to conserve oil: just look at the number of SUVs, RVs, etc on the road, the overwhelming reliance on cars for commuting, thr trucking of produce thousands of miles. There is much we can still do to reduce our use of oil. Instead of flying all over the country to tout his new film on intelligent design, Stein should sell his gas-guzzling car, stay home and tend an organic garden.

As a cultural conservative, I am sick of people who sell themselves as saviors of Western culture but who (when the chips are down) rush to sacrifice the best of Western culture on the altar of costly, high-tech, industrialized panaceas.

To attempt a joke on Ben's latest film, Stein should be "expelled" from the community of true conservatives for such silly suggestions about how to deal with peak oil.

Of course it is about consumption. If we didn't use as much as we do, oil would last much longer, of course.

But the fact is, we do use as much as we do. And it seems very little is going to change that fact. Gas has gone up almost 300 percent and it is just now barely changing our usage habits. And that's only due to unavoidable financial repercussions, not in order to extend our supplies.

Frankly, given our tendencies toward denial, difficulty in changing habits, and if it so much as causes inconvenience, much less hardship.. I can't see us really doing anything significant until we have no choice, either by some kind of either social or legal enforcement, or the fuel simply being unattainable either due to price or scarcity.

Uh, yeah. We don't drive around the block just to watch the fuel gauge move.

You would be surprised - I know I was - at what people do.

I live in this small town - about 600 people - and I watch people drive their pickup trucks two blocks - literally two blocks - from their house to their workplace. Not to haul tools or supplies or anything, just themselves.

As far as I can tell, my wife and a neighbor who does not own a car are the only ones that walk to work.

I just don't get it.

Karen Brown, Well, mdavid, when you start using gas by the cup, give me a call and tell me what you're using it in.

That's the point, I didn't think I needed to spell this out, but the reason we buy gas in gallons because it is so cheap right now. What other liquid can you buy for $0.18/cup that comes from overseas to reach you?

But if it makes you feel better, I haven't driven in two weeks and don't drive much all summer, so I'm using far less than a cup a day. I started trying to live this way when gas was 6 cents/cup ($1/gal), because it was so bloody obvious where oil production was going worldwide. Everyone was laughing at me then. Not so much today...and we ain't seen nothing yet baby.

Comparisons to water are fallacious on two levels

Did I miss something in the article or comments? I didn't see this comparison done.

A good comparison liquid to my mind is coffee, or perhaps milk or orange juice.

Gerry: "Yeah, and economists have predicted nine of the last five recessions."

Actually, they tend NOT to predict recessions. I believe the reason is most economists making public forecasts are on the payroll of a large investment bank or a politician. They do their dead level best to put as positive a spin on the data as possible without losing credibility.

Umm.. at least water is a necessity, unlike coffee or orange juice.

But, if you can go entirely without gasoline with as little effort or change of your lifestyle as deciding to do without coffee, more power to you.

And last I checked, I don't think a car would run very far on a cup of gasoline. We buy it by the gallon because most people drive far enough, and often enough (even only counting work and grocery store, etc) that a cup of gasoline wouldn't get you through the day. (I'm not even sure it would start your car, if the tank was dry.)

So, where do you live, or what do you drive that you use less than a cup of gasoline a day? (I do, but I don't even own a car, and am poor. Of course, that only counts transportation, not the plastics in my cupboard, and the electricity used to run this computer, for instance, or heat my water.)