The Saudis are going to increase oil production. Again. This is the third production increase in less than two months and I'm betting it will have the same negligible effect as the last two. Call me a pessimist, but I don't think we're going to see any significant decreases in the price of oil. Ever. We very well may be in the final stages before Peak Oil, characterized by rapidly increasing demand being (barely) met by smaller and smaller increases in production.

Of course eventually we reach cross over, demand outpaces production and that spells trouble-with-a-capital-tee for America. Our entire way of life is not only dependent on oil, it is dependent on cheap oil. Heretofore plentiful, light, sweet, easy-to-refine crude oil allowed us to build a sprawling, interstate-highway, suburban infrastructure around an economy that is reliant on rampant consumerism and growth for viability. While our current recession reveals our economy's vulnerability to the loss of that cheap oil, Peak Oil renders it completely unsustainable. (At least short of using our military to, say, invade and occupy an oil-rich country in order to maintain access to supplies, and even that can only provide a temporary relief.)

Meanwhile our short-sighted, but steely-eyed, oilman preznit is still busy pimping ANWR to the oil companies as a solution to all our economic problems. Check it:

On Wednesday, President Bush asked Congress to permit drilling for oil in deep water off the U.S. coast to combat rising oil prices.

He also renewed his demand that Congress allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, clear the way for more refineries and encourage efforts to recover oil from shale in areas like the Green River Basin, which encompasses parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

"In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply here at home," Bush said in a Rose Garden statement.

On what planet does that make any sense whatsoever? It would be at least ten years before a single drop of oil from ANWR could be brought to market and perhaps twice that long before what meager supply is actually available there could be fully exploited. The claim that drilling anywhere is a "short run" solution is an outright lie.

And in the long run too, for that matter. US Energy independence is a myth. Aside from the fact that any new oil produced would of course be sold into the ever-growing demand of the world market, with no guarantee that any of it would wind up in American gas tanks, the truth is we don't have any massive supplies of the good stuff, the cheap, easily obtained, easily refined oil that our economy actually runs on. If we did, we never would have become so dependent on Mid-East oil in the first place.

Though Peak Oil may not be upon us, it is most certainly coming and we need to begin preparing for it. It will require some real leadership from our government, politicians with the courage to give the American people bad news. It will be necessary to both down-size and re-structure our economy. It means the end of superpower. America will be forced to take a step down in the world, become less authoritarian, become, in essence more democratic on a world scale. We can do it voluntarily or have it forced upon us, but it will happen. Our only real choice is whether it is a gradual and controlled decline or a violent and bloody fall. Down a hill or off a cliff.

Right now our leaders, both Republican and Democrat are racing us toward that cliff, wasting time and resources, spending our future maintaining the illusion of a past that no longer exists and never will again. The longer we try to maintain the illusion the more precipitous our fall will be. Only genuine leadership will get us where we need to go. We'll have to change the way we do business; we'll have to change the way we do everything. It will require the introduction of a new form of conservatism based not on runaway capitalism, religious dogma and gay-bashing, but on, you know, actually being conservative.