Nothing new here. The world is running out of oil, not in the sense that
one day it will simply stop flowing, but in that supply will decrease relative to demand, prices will go up, and everyone will become more and more vulnerable to wars, weather, financial and other interruptions. New oil finds or improved extraction methods will, at best, delay this inevitability, not put an end to it. The fact that this is happening has been known for half a century, it is only the timetable and the details where there has been any honest room for debate.

Of course, oil is why we're in Iraq. Has there ever been any question? Everything else may have played a role, but if there were no oil there, or if it wasn't a key somehow to the oil economy, Iraq would be about as important to us as Darfur or Chad. Hell, even our military adventures in the Balkans were part of the oil scramble, they were protection of brutalized Muslim minorities in those countries undertaken to ingratiate ourselves with our Muslim oil-producing allies.

This is not to say that the industrialized countries are ready and eager to plunge the world into nuclear war to get all the oil they want, nor does it mean that our enemies are eager to blackmail us to get us to turn over everything in order to get what they want. But there is some element of truth to both of these statements and both of those dynamics will play a major role in how this whole thing plays out.

Everyone knew this was coming, but there was no real sense of urgency because the crunch was not expected so soon. Everyone felt market forces and conservation methods would control the petroleum hemorrhage until new energy technologies came on line to ease the transition. The prevailing wisdom was "why make hard choices now when the future will no doubt take care of itself, there is still plenty of time to work something out, and there will be plenty more incentive as prices go high enough". The failures of fission and fusion played a role as well. But what no one expected was the sudden growth of Chinese and Indian industrial demand. They took everyone by surprise, and we know now neither is in much of a mood to exercise much restraint in the way of conservation or environmental controls while developing their economies.

The world has reached a point where we can no longer depend on a charismatic leader, or a military victory, or a technological breakthrough or a major new resource find to solve this problem. The time for the quick fix is past. Only mutual belt-tightening and a lot of suffering are going to get us through this, and then only if we can all sit down and agree to cooperate and endure together the necessary unpleasantries its going to take.

And some conflict will be inevitable, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, because there will be those who will simply not want to cooperate. No, I'm not for mothballing the aircraft carriers just yet. There is no guarantee that this will not turn out very badly. We can still do this, but it would have been a lot easier if we had started when we first saw it coming.