[seattle smitty]

The Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, the world's largest, the field so big that it heretofore allowed the Saudis to moderate world oil price fluctuations by themselves, has recently been determined to be drawn down far below its halfway point. Short-sighted politicians tell us that we are very far from "running out" of oil, which is true on some scale, but we very definatly are running out of easily-extracted AFFORDABLE oil. Opening up the wilds of Alaska to drilling won't change this, Canadian tar-sands won't, the Spratly Islands won't.

My attitude is that expensive petroleum should be reserved (as soon as we can do it) for its "highest and best uses." As a non-oil example of this principle, take knot-free old-growth Sitka spruce timber, which has been cut and shipped to Japan in large volumes for decades. Most lumber today is punky, open-grained cr@p, but old-growth Sitka Spruce is a wonderfully old-fashioned lumber, good for building small airplanes and watercraft and musical instruments, and to my mind these are its highest and best uses, NOT building houses in Japan. The Japs tell us (and I lived there for half a year, with a carpenter's family), "It is our tradition to build houses with clear, fine-grained beams!" To this I say, "Times change, tough luck." Similarly, times are changing for the American driver and consumer. Tough luck. Adapt. If we drive smaller, less powerful, lighter vehicles during the week, burning fuels that are farmed or reconstituted from garbage, we save petroleum for higher and better uses, such as organic chemicals, airplane fuel, and so forth. Motor racing is a higher and better use for petroleum than is daily commuting; so is pleasure boating, so is motorcycling. And even then we can substitute bio-fuels in many cases. Petroleum, like Sitka Spruce, should be reserved first for those applications in which nothing else will do, the highest and best uses.