It makes you really feel the glory, the waste, the inequality, the danger, the pollution, the vast power of crude, but maybe most of all, it makes you feel America.

I think I must take some dried frog pills.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

The diesel streaked past a tiny glass porthole on the truck's hoses in a smear of pale yellow, like beer, while the premium unleaded ran colorless as vodka. That particular night, according to one industry method of calculating the explosive energy locked away in crude oil, Dunbar dumped the liquid equivalent of 19.2 million hours of physical labor into the Marathon's storage tanks--or the power of a slave army of 2,200 men working around the clock for a year. This bonanza would be sucked dry by customers in 24 hours, a small, stark example of the nation's awesome petroleum appetite at a time when the planet appears to be lurching into an energy crunch of historic proportions.

"Why worry about oil?" he retorted when Trager broached the topic of gas prices. "Canada's got them in tar sands, right? There's enough energy up there to last us lifetimes. We can say adios to Saudi Arabia."

A few minutes later the big man started speaking to himself in high-pitched cartoon voices. Then he asked Trager to stop at a liquor store, where he bought 6 pints of gin.

But as it happened, the Binnings were among the few gas station customers to ponder America's energy future beyond tomorrow's uptick in gas prices. They grappled with buying an electric-gasoline hybrid vehicle as their next car. They followed the news about peak oil. They fretted over the kind of world their three rambunctious boys--Weston, 3, Spencer, 6, and Parker--would inherit.

In the end, like most Americans, they were optimists. They had little choice. Their livelihood--selling property in suburbia--rests primarily on a dubious supposition: the continuing abundance of cheap crude. Laura faces this reality every day. Shuttling the boys across the suburbs to piano lessons, floor hockey practice, Little League and hip-hop dance classes, she can rack up 40 miles or more in the Hummer.

"Are there problems coming? Maybe. But I prefer to think the glass is half full," said Tim, 37, arriving home from his office one afternoon after a commute of 19 miles each way. "When shortages jack up oil prices permanently, someone will have the incentive to invent another fuel. That's how the market works."

... But, as we have seen, the basis for [long-term] expectations is vvery precarious. Being based on shifting and unreliablle evidence, they are subject to sudden and violent changes.

...

The later stages of the boom are characterised by optimistic expectations as to the future yield of capital-goods [e.g., suburban real state] sufficiently strong to offset their growing abundance and their rising costs of production and, probably, a rise in the rate of interest also. It is of the nature f organised investment markets, under the influence of purchasers laargely ignorant of what they are buying and of speculators who are more concerned with forecasting the next shift of market sentiment than with a reasonable estimate of the future yield of capital-assets, that, when disillusion falls upon an over-optimistic and over-bought market, it should fall with sudden and even catastrophic force. ...

...

This brings me to my point. The explanation of the time-element in the trade cycle, of the fact that an interval of time of a particular order of magnitude must usually elapse before recovery begins, is to be sought in the influences which govern the recovery of the marginal efficiency of capital.

What are the hidden costs of America's imported oil? The answer is complex. It may ultimately be unknowable. But this hasn't daunted the likes of Milton Copulos.

A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council Foundation--a right-of-center Washington think tank--Copulos spent 18 solid months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America's addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million each.)

Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his exhaustive findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this spring.

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?

Eight dollars a gallon.

When he isolated the hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the price jumped to $11. This included a war premium that swelled the Pentagon's spending to protect all Persian Gulf oil to $137 billion a year. In a truly transparent economy, by Copulos' math, filling up Rodriguez's Jeep would run about $230.

Consumers don't dodge the bill for all these masked expenditures. Instead, they pay for them indirectly, through higher taxes, or by saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt--one that's increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs of their oil habit, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their energy gluttony.

"Gas isn't too expensive," said Copulos. "It's way, way too cheap."

Or, as he put it to senators, quoting the cartoon character Pogo: "We have met the enemy and they is us."

"Let's go straight to the articles on Indian land rights," Alcides said with relish, wearing his wife's reading glasses. A 40-watt light bulb burned overhead and moths swarmed like electrons. He read laboriously, reverently, into the night, stumbling over words such as "unalienable." Nobody stirred.

Given the long Indian history with treaties, the scene was hard to watch. The faith seemed misplaced. Like it did at the opposite end of the energy trail in South Elgin, another oil-based utopia.

Thanks, Starvid.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

Nevertheless, it is brilliant.  It deserves a Pulitzer.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

One small thing which struck me was the absolutely abysmal gas milage of the vehicles people in Illinois were driving.  

Those monster cars we used to call "boats" (due to their huge size and spongily-soft ride) used to get nearly twice the milage of the clunky rigs Americans are driving now!  

In a subtle way this piece is as damning as anything James Howard Kundtser has written.