A Pipeline Runs Through It

Chances are that for all the angst about rising gasoline prices, you spend more on your cell phone service than you do on gasoline. In adjusted dollars, gas is as cheap as it's ever been. That's the problem, because cheap gas has shaped our lives in unforeseen and negative ways. We drive too far to work or just to get to the store. We live in subdivisions that are mazes so that nothing is within walking distance. Everything is widely scattered where car culture reigns.

We spend far more time idling in traffic than we spend talking to each other. We scrape woods away and destroy farmland to put up cardboard houses in far-flung suburbs, because that's the thing to do. When we're not at work or driving to and from there, we plant ourselves in front of the TV, rising only to mow the lawn or drive to the mall. We're fat, stressed, and lonely for the families, friends, and real homes we watched disappear in our rear view mirror as we drove away for good. Our kids are fat too, and they have asthma on top of that from pollution. We owe all this to the cheap gas that gave us mobility and expanded the distance between where we work and where we sleep at night.

Gas will cost more in times to come. Production has nearly or actually peaked, and our economic rival, China, is increasing its demand for the finite amount of oil produced by about thirty percent each year. Even at that, when the price peaks it may still cost less than the sum of your water and phone bills together. However, costs of delivered goods will rise because everything is shipped by truck. We'll be paying the same for less in the future.

Perhaps the biggest cost of gas is the hidden political price, which has been steep for some time. Take our corrosive relationship with our "bestest friends in the whole wide world", the ones we feel obliged to literally hold hands with, the Saudis. They have funded extremists for decades to buy them off. These are the very extremists  who produced the 9/11 attackers. It's no accident the hijackers were nearly all citizens of Saudi Arabia because Saudi Royals have allowed extremists to run the show outside their palace walls in exchange for a free hand to play the oil game with the western world.

The Saudi Royals can't be blamed exclusively. The fact is that we turned a blind eye to this protection racket for a very long time because the setup worked well for us too. The oil flowed our way while our friends got steadily richer. The fact is, it's better in a way to have a repressive regime in an oil producing country because that insures stability and continuity of supply. 

For all the current high-sounding rhetoric about wanting to spread democracy, we are still tempted to endorse the model of a dictatorship in our oil suppliers' countries. A case in point is Venezuela, where we would love to install a strongman in place of democratically elected Chavez. We can't predict what he's going to do next that might affect the flow of oil from his country. See how it works?

We went from tolerating the Saudi's funding of extremists to encouraging them to do so during the Soviet-Afghan conflict. Osama bin Laden was our boy there. And why, prey tell, were we so interested in Afghanistan at the time? For the same reasons the Soviets were: US and British oil companies planned to run an oil pipeline through it.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld had been smiling and shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We put his party in power a few years before, hoping for the same friendly oil relationship there that we had with the Saudis. Saddam was a cool pal also because he was willing to thump our enemy, Iran. We had a big falling out with them when their students took over our embassy and held American hostages until Reagan was elected. The reason we were in Dutch with Iran was the CIA had earlier destabilized a democratically elected government there in order to install the Shah. Why did we do that? Same old story, oil.

Well, our boy Saddam got uppity at some point, and invaded Kuwait for its oil. Supposedly, he asked for and received our permission first, but who knows the real story? Anyway, we were obliged to protect the sovereignty (i.e., the oil) of family-owned Kuwait and the Gulf War ensued. The rest is history, almost.

We got the Saudis to pay for that war, and US companies even made a little extra on the deal. Quite a little. This surely pissed off the extremists, but not as much as our leaving behind US troops stationed too close to Mecca for their sensibilities. Why did we do that? Any number of reasons, but probably Papa Bush intended to leave the door open for a future assault on Iraq. He hoped that sanctions would bring down Saddam, but perhaps he was hedging his bets by leaving the army close to Iraq's border.

Anyway, the rest is history: attack on USS Cole; our paying the Taliban 23 million dollars for "poppy eradication" in May of 2001; 9/11; Osama; Afghanistan; Saddam; WMD claims; Iraq War; Pakistan, a virtual farm system for grooming terrorists; spreading democracy; Afghanistan, again.

Unfortunately, the worst may be yet to come, and it goes far beyond Iraqi insurgents and the revitalization of the Taliban. China is paying new attention to governments that are problematic for us in places with oil. Alarmingly, the Chinese government is presently trying to buy an American international oil company, UnoCal, whose forte is doing oil business in dicey places. We are about to block that, but we have to be careful.

China is vying for 'our' oil, but each year China owns more of our debt, so we need to be nice to them. If we choose to be too antagonistic and deny them legitimate access to oil, they may become so frustrated that they dump their US dollars and/or turn to use of their military against Taiwan. The result could be apocalyptic.

What to do? Why, buy a Hummer and move to a bigger house farther out in the 'burbs, of course! There you can sit in front of your Chinese-made big screen TV and wait for Armageddon. With luck you won't be stuck in a traffic jam when the moment arrives.