"do not bother me with your bourgeois gasoline woes whilst I am drinking my macchiato"

The (much recovered) cowboy pointed me towards this article in the Times Magazine about the impending oil shortage:

If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals -- which is to say, almost every product on the market. The impact on the American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible.

Many New Yorkers are smug about such things; if there's no more oil, I guess Peoria and Denver and Duluth will just have to build subways!

I am reminded of a recent New York Magazine article about New Yorkers' opposition to a Wal-Mart in Rego Park -- some of it was ligitimate opposition from the grocery workers' union, or from activists, but much of it was urban snobbery. (I am certainly not immune to such snobbery, and would be embarassed by the presence of a Waltonesque monstrosity in my town; however, I balance my personal distaste of tacky things with the right of less well-off people to buy cheap cornflakes and parkas).

In any case, while the prospect of SUVs becoming too expensive to operate may delight many urban dwellers, worldwide recession is considerably less charming.

On an interesting engineering note, the article also pointed out (regarding the unfortunate fact that the Saudis have no obligation to tell anyone in any verifiable sense how much oil they actually have) that "the popular notion of [oil] reservoirs as underground lakes, from which wells extract oil like straws sucking a milkshake from a glass, is incorrect. Oil exists in drops between and inside porous rocks."