How Will California Respond to $200 a Barrel Oil?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Robert Cruickshank

As we're all painfully aware, during the '00s the US media have become ardent defenders of the status quo, generally unwilling to discuss harsh realities that might threaten that status quo unless absolutely forced to do so - Hurricane Katrina, for example, or the reaction to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps the most significant issue not being discussed in the media is peak oil - which, in its simplistic form, explains why the high fuel prices we are seeing today are going to be a permanent feature of life.

Gas prices are NEVER coming back down - rising demand is meeting a shrinking supply and the result is the end of the cheap oil that modern America was built upon.

As gas prices remain high more media outlets are discussing energy policy but only lately are they beginning to acknowledge that the era of cheap oil is over. Yesterday's Los Angeles Times starts examining the topic with a front-page feature, Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil. It focuses on how consumers, transportation, and global trade will be affected, and even tries to examine the "upside" to this, particularly the eventual localization of American life, perhaps the closest a major American media outlet has come to embracing the ideas of Jim Kunstler.

The article is a good beginning, but it avoids the key question of how we ought to respond. Videoconferencing and staycations are not substitutes for statewide initiatives to deal with the crisis. The article discusses the airline crisis but doesn't discuss ways to provide alternative forms of transportation such as high speed rail. Nor does it discuss ways to encourage more renewable energy sources, or local food production, or urban density.

Still, just as it took Al Gore's movie to convince Californians to take even the small step of climate change action embodied in AB 32, so too will it take the media's willingness to tell Californians that cheap oil is over to produce action on shifting our state away from an oil-based economy.