Island Breath: End of Oil Economy

SUBJECT: END OF OIL ECONOMY

SOURCE: JUAN WILSON juanwilson@mac.com

POSTED: 4 April 2005 - 9:30pm HST

A devastating economic change for most in Hawaii

Oil Tanker "Prestige" founders at sea. What will happen to Kauai?

Population and development boom will be disaster for Kauai
by Juan Wilson published 4 April 2005

A time is coming when the oil economy that has made us prosperous will run its course. We are over 100 years into it now. Maybe there will be another decade. But whether it is 5, 10 or 20 years of Oil Nation one thing is certain; slowing the population growth and development of the "suburban lifestyle" on Kauai will be to our advantage.

American consumerism is not necessary for a good life on Kauai and will only lead to great suffering when it can't be supported in the future and people are dependent on (addicted to) it. If we begin planning for the contingency of sustainable self reliance we will have a head start on a new and rewarding future.

No one alive today can remember a when there wasn't as much cheap oil around as we needed. It is hard to picture what life will be like when we lose abundant cheap energy. Use your imagination and visualize what is likely to happen to Kauai if oil is gone in 25 years and we have spent that time converting cane fields into cul-de-sacs full of ranch homes and highways full of shopping plazas.

Imagine Kauai without a fuel barge arriving any time soon to fill the tank farm in Port Allen. Result - 80% of the electricity on the island will vanish. Air travel will be out of reach. Few private cars will be on the road.

Within a short time if your dinner wasn't hunted down or grown within walking distance of your kitchen, chances are you will be hungry tonight. Rural areas that have productive agricultural land should not be over run with suburban sprawl. That is why we shouldn't want Costco or another 100,000 people on this island. Here are a couple of articles about the End of Oil.

What if oil cost $ 200 a barrel?
by Simon Ratcliffe on 8 March 2005 published in Business Day
(http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4650)

In two years’ time the price of oil could reach $ 200 a barrel. Farfetched? Maybe.
Although estimates of oil and gas reserves vary widely, geologists Anders Sivertsson, Kjell Aleklett and Colin Campbell, of Uppsala University in Sweden, are the latest in a growing group of experts who believe that oil supplies will peak by 2010, if not before, and gas soon after.

A study by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre concludes that world oil supplies are certain to remain tight through the rest of this decade. It found that all the major new oil-recovery projects scheduled to come on stream over the next six years were unlikely to boost supplies enough to meet the world’s growing needs. The centre analysed 68 "mega projects" that will add about 12,5 mm bpd to world oil supplies by the turn of the decade. More than half of the estimated new supply would simply replace production declines elsewhere.

"With most producers operating flat out to meet runaway demand increases this year, the world’s immediately available spare production capacity has virtually disappeared," the report read.

Production quotas are unable to keep pace with world demand of 82 mm bpd, which is increasing as China’s and India’s economies grow. The era of cheap oil is at an end, experts and the industry are warning. A diverse range of oil industry insiders -- like Ali Bakhtiari, head of strategic planning at Iran’s National Oil Company; Dr Colin Campbell; a former executive vice-president of Total-Fina; and Matthew Simmons, an energy investment banker and energy adviser to the Bush administration -- are united in their belief that global oil production is about to peak, which will signal the permanent end of cheap oil.

And they warn that this is the reason for the current rise in oil prices. Simmons believes oil is "far too cheap" and should be about $ 182 a barrel. The only way to control demand is to price oil realistically, allowing for time to find fuels to fill the gap between an oileconomy and a renewable fuel economy.

Large new oil fields are ever more difficult to find and Campbell says endless growth is not possible. The adherents of the "peak oil theory" warn that the decline of world oil output will force oil prices higher for good, and that the knock-on effects could be catastrophic.

Bakhtiari believes there will be a sudden explosion in prices soon and the people who will be least affected will be the impoverished, who have no access to energy, and the super-rich. The middle classes will be hurt the most, he warns.

Campbell’s research into oil reserves suggests that many official oil data are either flawed estimates or at worst downright lies. Scandals like the 23 % of "lost" reserves at Shell last year have boosted interest in his work. False reserves threaten the security of energy supply, just as much as bombs under pipelines.
It seems clear the world is close to that tipping point where demand exceeds supply. Elementary economics warns that when this happens prices increase. Political events, of course, also have an effect on oil prices. But it is unlikely that the US plans to invade Iraq were calculated around oil prices at $ 50 a barrel. The strategists were probably hoping for $ 20 a barrel. In the event that oil supplies from Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia become unpredictable, is $ 200 a barrel unrealistic if the world’s largest producers are upset by war, invasions and political agendas?

A Pentagon study on the security implications of global warming, titled Imagining the Unthinkable, predicts that in the not too distant future, wars will be fought primarily over resources. How many of us will be able afford theses prices or more it will take to fill our cars’ petrol tanks? How will the price of food be affected when the costs of bringing it to market rise dramatically? How much of our economic model will survive, given that much of it presupposes cheap oil? Can we continue to assume that we can procure raw materials for manufacturing from anywhere in the world? Can we assume that we can sell goods anywhere?

And what of those businesses that are dependent on cheap oil for their survival? The airline industry is under severe strain with oil at present levels, and some companies could go out of business. And what of all the oil by-products, plastics, tar and chemicals? For some of these, there are no alternatives on the market yet.

If oil prices soar, it is likely that globalisation will fail and world economies will become much more local. What we consume will need to be produced locally; where we work and where our children are schooled, too, will need to be close to home. We might end up in a world that rapidly contracts.

This may sound pretty far-fetched, but the data on oil supply seems to be telling us that we need to start making alternative energy plans.

Gas-guzzling good times are nearly over
by Sandra Paterson on 2 April 2005
(http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10118237)

I spent nearly $500 fixing my car last week and it is really time I got rid of it.
Apart from the fact that the mileage is high and it is starting to fall apart, I am very aware that this model has a poor safety record.

The thought of having to find another one is depressing, but in the past few days I've been wondering if I should instead be creating a life less reliant on petrol.
I don't normally have much daily head-space for global environmental issues, and what with bills to pay, the cat vomiting on the carpet, parent-teacher interviews and a couple of family members in hospital this past fortnight, I was not giving much thought to oil production levels.

But after watching an item on Campbell Live the other day and doing some related reading, it has registered all of a sudden on my radar screen: we are in deep doo-doo.

As John Campbell said, introducing the report, "Life as we know it will inevitably change - dramatically and fairly soon."

In summary, and according to most geologists, the world is about to start running out of oil. Big deal? Yes, it is when you realize just how much our lives revolve around the stuff.

If oil becomes scarce, we can kiss goodbye to just about every aspect of modern life: computers, heart valves, fanbelts, supermarket bags, tires, sunglasses, ink, anesthetics and telephones, the list of everyday items containing oil is enormous.
Take away petroleum, which is an ingredient in pesticides and fertilizer and upon which modern farming machinery depends, and agricultural yields would drop dramatically.

Shipping or flying what goods we do manage to produce to local or overseas markets would be astronomically expensive; and as for living a 40-minute commute from work or driving to another town just to see a friend, forget it.
We will look back fondly at the time petrol was a mere $1.30 a liter ($6/gallon).

Sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn't it. But there are way too many reputable scientists sounding the alarm for it to be mere conjecture.

Professor Geoff Kearsley from Otago University: "Oil scarcity has the capacity to devastate our economy, physically isolate us in ways not seen since before World War II and to transform our daily lives. It is already past the time when this should be our primary national concern."

When is this all going to happen? That depends on whether you listen to the optimists or the pessimists. We are already using more oil than we produce, by about four barrels to one.

Most predictions are that some time between 2005 and 2010, oil production will begin to decline at around 3 per cent a year. Others say it will be two or three decades later. But there are very few experts disputing the fact that we have a problem.

The baffling thing is that most people on the street know nothing about it.

Politicians aren't talking about it; media outlets, with a few notable exceptions, are being slow to pick up on it; and you just don't hear oil talked about over the fence or the office water cooler, apart from complaints about the price of petrol.

We are talking about energy policy, but only in terms of power, not fuel. We are talking about transport and infrastructure, expanding our already-sprawling cities and building more roads without thinking whether anyone will be able to afford to drive on them.

Why, I asked Professor Kearsley this week. Why is no one talking about it?
Why do I suspect the most likely response to this column will be either a deafening silence or one or two critical letters to the editor about greenie scaremongers?

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe because it is just so scary, we don't want to talk about it."

Trevor Mallard, the Minister of Energy, said on Campbell Live that oil scarcity "is going to be a problem but maybe we're not that close to it yet. The best estimate that we have is that it will be in the 2030s."

Even if he is right, and most of the experts say it will be significantly sooner, why is the Government doing so little about it? Where is the select committee on the likely impact of global oil shortage? Where is the massive shift away from private motor cars to public transport?

If the scientists are to be believed, a massive change in the way we live is inevitable. But we can cushion the fall if politicians are willing to admit the problem and get to work on it.

Iceland, for example, has launched a major campaign to phase out fossil fuels and run its cars and fishing fleets on hydrogen fuel. Whether that is possible is another matter, but at least they are trying to address the problem.

Unfortunately, burying one's head in the sand is human nature. I've thought a lot about oil shortage this week and how it may affect my life. Should I be living closer to my ailing grandfather? Will it be impossible to continue sending my daughter to a school across town? How much money do I put into replacing my car?

But what do you bet that, within a month or so, I'll be thinking of other things. Life goes on. Until it putters and splutters to a stop.

Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?
by Robert Freeman on 1 March 2004
(http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0301-12.htm)

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a stake and place it in a clearing.

Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it is. It can just barely get its hand into the coconut but, stuffed with booty, it cannot pull the hand back out. The Indians easily walk up to the monkey and capture it. Even as the Indians approach, the monkey screams in horror, not only in fear of its captors, but equally as much, one imagines, in recognition of the tragedy of its own lethal but still unalterable greed.

Pirsig uses the story to illustrate the problem of value rigidity. The monkey cannot properly evaluate the relative worth of a handful of food compared to its life. It chooses wrongly, catastrophically so, dooming itself by its own short-term fixation on a relatively paltry pleasure.

America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face (whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean ourselves off of oil—to quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilization—or to continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force.

As with Pirsig’s monkey, the alternative consequences of each choice could not be more dramatic. Weaning ourselves off of cheap oil, while not easy, will help ensure the vitality of the American economy and the survival of its political system. Choosing the route of force will almost certainly destroy the economy and doom America’s short experiment in democracy.

To date, we have chosen the second alternative: to secure oil by force.

The evidence of its consequences are all around us. They include the titanic US budget and trade deficits funding a gargantuan, globally-deployed military and the Patriot Act and its starkly anti-democratic rescissions of civil liberties. There is little time left to change this choice before its consequences become irreversible.
The world is quickly running out of oil. In the year 2000, global production stood at 76 Million Barrels per Day (MBD). By 2020, demand is forecast to reach 112 MBD, an increase of 47%. But additions to proven reserves have virtually stopped and it is clear that pumping at present rates is unsustainable. Estimates of the date of “peak global production” vary with some experts saying it already may have occurred as early as the year 2000. New Scientist magazine recently placed the year of peak production in 2004. Virtually all experts believe it will almost certainly occur before the end of this decade.

And the rate of depletion is accelerating. Imagine a production curve that rises slowly over 145 years—the time since oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859. Over this time, the entire world shifted to oil as the foundation of industrial civilization. It invested over one hundreds trillion dollars in a physical infrastructure and an economic system run entirely on oil. But oil production is now at its peak and the right hand side of the curve is a virtual drop off. Known reserves are being drawn down at 4 times the rate of new discoveries.

The reason for the drop off is that not only have all the “big” discoveries already been made, the rate of consumption is increasing dramatically. Annual world energy use is up five times since 1945. Increases are now driven by massive developing countries—China, India, Brazil—growing and emulating first or at least second world consumption standards. Fixed supply. Stalled discoveries. Sharply increased consumption. This is the formula for global oil depletion within the next few decades.

The situation is especially critical in the US. With barely 4% of the world’s population, the US consumes 26% of the world’s energy. But the US produced only 9 MBD in 2000 while consuming 19 MBD. It made up the difference by importing 10 MBD, or 53% of its needs. By 2020, the US Department of Energy forecasts domestic demand will grow to 25 MBD but production will be down to 7 MBD. The daily shortfall of 18 MBD or 72% of needs, will all need to be imported.
Perhaps it goes without saying but it deserves repeating anyway: oil is the sine qua non of “industrial” civilization—the one thing without which such civilization cannot exist. All of the world’s 600 million automobiles depend on oil. So do virtually all other commodities and critical processes: airlines, chemicals, plastics, medicines, agriculture, heating, etc. Almost all of the increase in world food productivity over the past 50 years is attributable to increases in the use of oil-derived additives: pesticides; herbicides; fungicides; fertilizers; and machinery.

When oil is gone, civilization will be stupendously different.

The onset of rapid depletion will trigger convulsions on a global scale, including, likely, global pandemics and die-offs of significant portions of the world’s human population.

The “have” countries will face the necessity kicking the “have-nots” out of the global lifeboat in order to assure their own survival. Even before such conditions are reached, inelastic supply interacting with inelastic demand will drive the price of oil and oil-derived commodities through the stratosphere, effecting by market forces alone massive shifts in the current distribution of global wealth.

If the US economy is not to grind to a halt under these circumstances it must choose one of three alternate strategies: dramatically lower its living standards (something it is not willing to do); substantially increase the energy efficiency of its economy; or make up the shortfall by securing supplies from other countries. President Bush’s National Energy Policy published in March 2001 explicitly commits the US to the third choice: Grab the Oil. It is this choice that is now driving US military and national security policy. And, in fact, the past 60 years of US policy in the Middle East can only be understood as the effort to control access to the world’s largest supply of oil.

Witness, for example, the deep US embrace of Saudi Arabia since World War II. One quarter of all US weapons sales between 1950 and 2000 went to Saudi Arabia despite its horrifically repressive, literally medieval tribal nature. The CIA’s overthrow of Mohamed Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 after he nationalized his country’s oil is another example. So, too, was the US strategic embrace of Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. The US was deeply mired in Vietnam but needed a “cop on the beat” to challenge Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen—that were “going Soviet.” It has stuck with that relationship ever since.

More recent examples of national strategy in bondage to the compulsion for oil include US support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran/Iraq War; its support for Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan War against the Soviet Union; and, of course, the most recent invasion of Iraq to seize its oilfields and forward position US forces for an invasion of neighboring Saudi Arabia when it is inevitably destroyed by internal civil war. And under a Grab the Oil strategy, militarization of US society will only deepen.

The reason is that a very major portion of the world’s oil is, by accident of geology, in the hands of states hostile to the US. Fully 60% percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil are in the Persian Gulf. They lie beneath Muslim countries undergoing a religious revolution that wants to return the industrial world to a pre-modern order governed by a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. Saudi Arabia alone controls 25% of all the world’s oil, more than that of North America, South America, Europe and Africa combined. Kuwait, Iran and Iraq, each control approximately 10% of the world’s oil.

Another 15% of the world’s oil lies in the Caspian Sea region, also a dominantly Muslim region. It includes a group of post-Soviet, satellite and buffer states that lack any semblance of legal or market systems. They are extraordinarily corrupt, really just Gangster Thugocracies masquerading as countries. Think Afghanistan. Both Russia and China consider this region part of their “sphere of strategic influence” portending significant clashes for the US over coming decades.

As long as the US chooses the Grab the Oil alternative, the implications for national policy are inescapable. The combination of all these facts—fixed supply, rapid depletion, lack of alternatives, severity of consequences, and hostility of current stockholding countries—drive the US to HAVE to adopt an aggressive (pre-emptive) military posture and to carry out a nakedly colonial expropriation of resources from weaker countries around the world.

This is why the US operates some 700 military bases around the world and spends over half a trillion dollars per year on military affairs, more than all the rest of the world—its “allies” included—combined. This is why the Defense Department’s latest Quadrennial Review stated, “The US must retain the capability to send well-armed and logistically supported forces to critical points around the globe, even in the face of enemy opposition.” This is why Pentagon brass say internally that current force levels are inadequate to the strategic challenges they face and that they will have to re-instate the draft after the 2004 elections.

But the provocation occasioned by grabbing the oil, especially from nations ideologically hostile to the US, means that military attacks on the US and the recourse to military responses will only intensify until the US is embroiled in unending global conflict. This is the perverse genius of the Grab the Oil strategy: it comes with its own built-in escalation, its own justification for ever more militarization—without limit. It will blithely consume the entire US economy, the entire society, without being sated. It is, in homage to Orwell, Perpetual War for Perpetual Grease.

In his first released tape after 9/11, Osama bin Laden stated that he carried out the attacks for three reasons: 1) to drive US military forces from Saudi Arabia, the most sacred place of Islam; 2) to avenge the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children killed, according to UNICEF, as a result of the US-sponsored embargo of the 1990s; and, 3) to punish US sponsorship of Israeli oppression against the Palestinian people. Oil and the need to control it are critically implicated in all three reasons.

But now comes the sobering part. In response to the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that the US was engaged in “…a thirty to forty year war (!) against fundamentalist Islam.” It is the fever of War, of course, that becomes the all-purpose justification for the rollback of civil liberties. Lincoln used the Civil War to justify the suspension of habeas corpus. Roosevelt used the cover of World War II to inter hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans. And now Bush is using the self-ratcheting “War on Terror” to effect even more sweeping, perhaps permanent rescissions of civil liberties.

Under the Patriot Act, a person can be arrested without probable cause, held indefinitely without being charged, tried without a lawyer or a jury, sentenced without the opportunity to appeal, and put to death—all without notification of…anybody. This is simply a Soviet Gulag and it has been rationalized by the hysterical over-hyping of the War on Terror. The fact that it is not yet widespread does not diminish the more important fact that it has been put in place precisely in anticipation of such procedures needing to be being carried out on a mass scale in the future.

The broader implications of the Patriot Acts go far beyond the abusive treatment of criminals or terrorists. Their portent can be glimpsed in the language used to justify them. When Attorney General John Ashcroft testified on behalf of the Act, he stated, “…those who oppose us are providing aid and comfort to the enemy.” These are carefully chosen words. “Aid and comfort to the enemy” are the words used in the Constitution to define Treason, the most fateful of crimes against the state. In other words, protest against the government—the singular right without which America would not even exist—is now being defined as trying to overthrow the government.

And by the internal logic of a global Oil Empire, this is entirely reasonable. The needs of the people of any one country must be subordinated to the larger agenda of Empire itself. This is what the Romans learned in 27 B.C. when Augustus proclaimed himself Emperor. It was the end of the Roman Republic and the disappearance of representative government on earth for almost 1,700 years, until the English Civil Wars in the 1600s. That is the reality we are confronting today—offering up our democracy in propitiation to an Empire for Oil. It will be a fateful, irreversible decision.

Returning to Pirsig’s metaphor, the choice of a Grab the Oil strategy is the equivalent of the monkey holding onto the handful of food, remaining trapped by the coconut. It is an ironclad guarantee of escalating global conflict, isolation of the US in the world, unremitting attacks on the US by those whose oil is being expropriated and whose societies are being dominated, the militarization of the US economy, the irreversible rescission of civil liberties, and the eventual extinguishment of American democracy itself. It is the conscious, self-inflicted consignment to political and economic death.

But the coconut metaphor, remember, involves a choice—food or freedom. What, then, is the alternative, the letting go of the paltry handful of food in conscious preference for the life of continued freedom?

The alternative to Grab the Oil is to dispense with the hobbling dependency on oil itself and to quickly wean the country off of it. Call it the path of Energy Reconfiguration. It is to declare a modern day Manhattan Project aimed at minimizing the draw down in the world’s finite stocks of oil, extending their life, and mitigating the calamity inherent in their rapid exhaustion. It means building a physical infrastructure to the economy that is based on an alternative to oil. And it means doing this, not unilaterally or militarily as the US is doing now, but in peaceful partnership with other countries of the world, the other counties in our shared global lifeboat that are also threatened by the end of oil.
In more specific terms, energy reconfiguration means retrofitting all of the nation’s buildings, both commercial and residential, to double their energy efficiency. It means a crash program to shift the transportation system—cars, trucks—to a basis that uses perhaps half as much oil per year. This is well within reach of current technology. Energy Reconfiguration means using biotechnology to develop crops that require much less fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and machinery to harvest. It means refitting industrial and commercial processes—lighting, heating, appliances, automation, etc.—so that they, too, consume far less energy than they do today. It means increasing efficiency, reducing consumption, and building sustainable, long-term alternatives in every arena in which the economy uses oil.

Such a program would return incalculable benefits to national security, the economy, and to the environment.

In terms of national security, Energy Reconfiguration greatly reduces the county’s susceptibility to oil blackmail. It reduces the need for provocative adventurism into foreign countries in pursuit of oil. As such, it reduces the incentive for terrorism against the US. And by reducing such threats, it reduces the need for a sprawling, expensive military abroad and a repressive police state at home. Savings in military costs—perhaps on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year—could well pay for such a program. The saving of democracy, of course, is priceless.

The economic benefits are at least equally impressive. By reducing energy imports, the US would reduce its hemorrhaging trade deficit and the mortgaging of the nation’s future that such borrowing implies. A national corps of workers set to retrofitting the nation’s homes and businesses for energy efficiency would address employment problems for decades in a way that could not be outsourced to Mexico or India or China. And a more efficient industrial infrastructure would make all goods made in America more competitive with those made abroad. In all of these ways, Energy Reconfiguration raises, not lowers, the average standard of living while increasing the resilience of the economy as a whole.

Energy Reconfiguration also delivers enormous, perhaps incalculable, benefits to the environment.

By reducing energy intensity, it reduces the impact on the biotic carrying systems of any level of economic activity. Global warming may be the single most potent threat to global stability today. A recently leaked Pentagon report predicted that rapid climate change may well set off global competition for food and water supplies and, in the worst scenarios, spark nuclear war. If the US did no more than change from being the most energy inefficient economy in the industrial world to being of only average efficiency, it would dramatically slow the environmental destruction that hangs like a sword over the entire world.

Are there any precedents for such an ambitious vision? In the 1980s China adopted a nationwide energy efficiency program. Within a decade, overall energy intensity fell by 50% while economic growth led the developing world. Also in the 1980s, Denmark began a crash program in wind-generated electricity. Today, wind provides 10% of Denmark’s electricity while Denmark makes 60% of all the wind turbines sold in the world. India’s Renewable Energy Development Agency used a similar set of programs beginning in 1987 to reduce oil based electricity usage. Today, India is the largest user of photovoltaic systems in the world.
Even within the US there are ample precedents for optimism. The US economy was 42% more energy efficient in 2000 than it was in the 1970s when the Arab oil embargoes shocked the country into action. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards more than doubled the average mileage of US automobiles between 1975 and 1985 before being effectively abandoned in the late 1980s. The National Research Council has reported that efficiency programs sponsored by the Department of Energy returned $20 for every $1 invested, making them arguably one of the best investments in the economy even before a change in national energy strategy.

We should harbor no illusions, however, that adopting such a strategy will be easy. The military and energy industries in which the Bush family is so heavily invested will vigorously resist such a policy. And the energy bill now making its way through Congress is nothing so much as a testament to the death grip the energy industry holds on the American people. It provides tens of billions of dollars of subsidies and giveaways to energy companies while actually encouraging more intensive energy use. As the poster boy of these leviathans, President Bush expressed their sentiments best: “We need an energy policy that encourages consumption.” What more need be said?

In the end, the choice of these two alternatives—Grab the Oil or Energy Reconfiguration—is much bigger than oil alone. It is a choice about the fundamental ethos and, in fact, the very nature of the country. Most immediately, it is about democracy versus empire. In economic terms, it is about prosperity or poverty. In engineering terms, it is a matter of efficiency over waste. In moral terms this is the choice of sufficiency or gluttony. From the standpoint of the environment, it is a preference for stewardship over continued predation. In the ways the US deals with other countries it is the choice of co-operation versus dominance. And in spiritual terms, it is the choice of hope, freedom and purpose over fear, dependency and despair. In this sense, this is truly the decision that will define the future of America and perhaps the world.

A final word on Pirsig’s monkey. The monkey is doomed but not tragic. For the monkey cannot really comprehend the fateful implications of its choice: that its greed assures its doom. In the case of people and a country, however, that is not the case. It is no accident that President Bush has not asked any sacrifices of the country for his War on Terror. That is part of the seduction, like the candy a drug pusher uses to lure an unsuspecting child.

But we cannot, like the monkey, claim to be unaware of the choice we are making. Awareness of such choices is part of the burden of mature citizenship. Nor can we feign ignorance of the consequences. Simply put, our present course will cost us our country. And our doom will be compounded by incalculable tragedy and what Lincoln once called “the last best hope for mankind” will, indeed, perish from this earth. Unless, that is, we find the vision, the wisdom and the courage to let go that handful of paltry treats and choose freedom instead.