OIL!

Digsby raises an interesting point in his review of Syriana.

But the single most important player is oil (which in real life, for reasons that are mystifying, is widely considered to be a tin-foil hat, loony-left explanation, even among liberals.)

Oil has changed everything about our existence; and just as we are starting to realize that, it won't last much longer. Which is why it is "widely considered a tin-foil hat, loony-left explanation." We don't like to think about either of those truths, but they are as real as sunrise and as verifiable as the wooden desk I'm sitting at.

The keyboard I type on would be impossible without oil. As would my computer. The food you eat is raised by petroleum fertilizers, or was harvested by petroleum driven machines, and certainly came to you by petroleum powered transport. Nothing delivers the amount of energy per pound that oil does. And our military is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the country.

We cannot live as we do without it.

Remove the oil, the cars stop. The electricity ends, if not immediately, then as soon as spare parts are needed, and the plastics to make them cannot be supplied. Long before that, of course, the factories that make the parts would be closed. In fact, they would close immediately, because no one could get to work. Farms would halt production, unable to harvest, unable to raise crops, unable to transport what was raised. Ships would drift, planes fall from the sky, trucks rust by the side of the road, trains slide to a halt.

An apocalyptic vision, because it presumes an end all at once. The reality will be worse. Until Spindletop and the internal combustion engine, humankind lived without using petroleum products, except on a very small basis, and that only slightly before the Texas gusher. Until the discovery of oil in the Middle East, the largest known reserves in the world were in Texas. That is why Kilgore and Longview are still dotted with oil well derricks, symbols of the industry that literally created those towns.

And in less than 100 years, we've used it up. Now the rest of the world wants some, too. China is producing greenhouse gases faster than anyone else on the planet. They are doing it with oil.

When the tractors can't get it, and the trains, and the ships, and the cars, and the trucks, and we can't manufacture CD's and DVD's and laptops...what will we do then?

Of course it is about oil. And of course, we don't want to face that. This too is, in its peculiar way, a part of Advent.