I had a spiritual experience the other day. And as these things go, it happened in the most unlikely of places, a local convenience store. I was filling up my car, getting torched at $3.54 a gallon. I looked at the guy next to me, who was filling up a huge double-souped, fuel-injected, king-cab-flame-red pickup.

I began to get angry, mad, furious at how I felt the consumer was being shafted, but before I could let loose a barrage of unprintable words, something happened. Instead of cussing at the sidewalk, and the oil companies and this administration, I felt a slight rigor in my soul. Before I knew it, that rigor had turned into a full-blown spiritual tornado whirling me to my knees on the hard concrete, right next to the pump, and I began giving fervent thanks to the Almighty.

I thanked the Almighty that in his providential wisdom, he had seen fit to work his mysterious will upon that juiced-up bastion of liberal thought, commonly known as the U.S. Supreme Court, so they would render that 5-4 decision way back in 2000, putting two oil men in the White House. Because the revelation was hard upon me: who better to lead this country through a serious energy crisis than two oil men? After all, if you can’t trust two oil men to manage an energy crisis, who can you trust? It was a revelation, I tell you.

Speaking of revelation, a couple of years ago, I wrote a column about the enigma known as “peak oil” and I predicted then that oil was eventually going to hit $100 dollars a barrel. It didn’t take Nostradamus to figure that out, only a mouse, modem and a keyboard. I followed up with a similar argument rebutting then Congressman Roger Wicker’s charge that high oil prices were the result of policies instituted by tree-hugging liberals.

We are in the middle of a serious crisis. While I have publically excoriated this Administration at almost every turn (not that anyone has lost any sleep about that), to be fair, I don’t think high gas prices are totally the fault of Messrs. Cheney and Bush. In my response to Wicker, I pointed out that way back in the 1950s an engineer with Dutch Shell, M. King Hubbert, had calculated that easily obtainable crude was actually a finite resource and that the world would reach the peak of obtaining this oil early in this century.

Now, it probably is true that on top of everything else, the oil companies are squeezing us, but assuming Mr. Hubbert is correct, then we in America have done a pretty foolhardy thing. We have built a post WW II economy upon a finite resource. If Mr. Hubbert is correct, we have compounded our stupidity with even more stupidity. We have done little or nothing to prepare for the end of the age of oil.

This information has been available to administrations and Congress, and aside from Jimmy Carter, who attempted to implement alternative energy policies, no one has seemingly taken much leadership on the issue.

The problem, of course, is that with the election of two oil men in 2000, it almost guaranteed that nothing would be done as we reached the crisis point. In fact, early in this Administration, there were secret energy meetings conducted with Cheney but the results of those have largely remained sealed and closed. The sins of this administration are that instead of leading us out of the wilderness of peak oil, they took us to war in Iraq. There, you will find the second largest oil reserves in the world. And according to a recent ABC report, a third of that oil is being siphoned off the black market. Now, how you siphon off crude, and change it to gas, without the official oky doky and knowledge of some governmental or corporate entity is beyond me. But that is what ABC reported and we know ABC would never mislead us.

If this be true, there is a shadow over our future economic health. Oil affects everything, from transportation to food production, to plastics, to the development of new housing projects in the country. And on it goes. By the way, the same Goldman Sachs expert who predicted $100 a barrel is now predicting $200 a barrel within a couple of years.

Of course, the free market will then take over and the car companies will finally unveil that 75 mpg car which they will be happy to sell the average consumer for, say, about $50,000. Meanwhile that double souped flame red pickup will sit rusting in the yard. Then there is one certain Republican congressional candidate whose economic plan is to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the top one percent.

Yeah. That's the ticket.

Richard Babb is an attorney and may be reached at rjbabb56@yahoo.com and at P.O. Box 7118, Tupelo, MS 38802. 

Appeared originally in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 5/11/2008, section 0 , page 0