Only 2 percent of the US population lives on the farm, feeding the rest of our nation. Modern Agriculture, contrary to family style Amish Farming Practice or the Principles of the Minority Practice of Organic Farming, is the use of land as a massive corporate mechanism for converting petroleum into food. Oil drives the tractors, harvesters, 18 wheelers and the irrigation pumps sucking the irreplaceable pre-historic rainfall substance from the deep Ogalala Acquifer which underlies the midwest's "Breadbasket of the World". . Oil resources are finite and the rate at which cheap and easy oil could be discovered, worldwide, peaked back in the 1960's. The richly producing Alaska Pipeline peaked in 1988, and has been diminishing since. Yearly we are down to discovering only 7 billion barrels of new oil in the same time it is taking us to burn 23 billion barrels of that which has been previously discovered

 We will eat well as long as the oil lasts. A gallon of gasoline in an old John Deere farm tractor can do as much work as the118 field hands needed to pull weeds on their knees for a whole hour. One gallon = 118 man hours of human labor. Agri-Business is Oil-Business.

 But if we are truly about to run out of oil, how is it possible there are no shortages, and how come the price is going down? Isn't the price supposed to go UP when things get scarce?

Usually that's the way things go, but the world petroleum market is a little bit different. Back in the mid-1970's when OPEC choked off the World oil supply, they were able to force the price of scarce oil up over $30 a barrel. Money rolled in to them in great waves, and like a family just having won big bucks in the lottery, OPEC nations went on a buying spree, building new cities in the desert, and it seemed like every other oil family had bought its own personal jet, based on credit and expectations. They were "nouveau riche", newly massively enriched, up to their ears in money, but also committed to bigtime debt, and when the price of oil collapsed back to under half, less than $15 a barrel, the only way they could keep up the payments on their purchases was to sell twice as much oil at half the price. And the more they sold, the more the market dropped!

  But OPEC had a quota system to regulate wastrel production…an OPEC member nation would only be permitted to pump more oil if it had very large amounts reported in reserve under-ground. And the quota was set based on how much unverified oil a country chose to report. Suddenly, without really drilling many more wells, the OPEC countries began to report huge increases in their oil reserves. In billions of barrels of underground oil, Abu Dhabi had 31.0 in 1987, but 92.2 a year later in 1988. Dubar with1.4 jumped to 4.0 in a single year. Iran 48.8 to 93.0. Iraq 47.1 to 100.0. Kuwait 63.9 to 90.0. Saudi Arabia 167.0 to 257.5. Venezuela 25.0 to 56.3.

 Petroconsultants in Geneva, Switzerland keeps track of world oil supplies, and these are their figures taken from "THE COMING OIL CRISIS," by Dr. Colin. J. Campbell.

And if inaccurate figures have allowed for a production oil glut and today's low prices, what will happen when the wells begin to run dry ahead of time and begin the slurping sound like a straw in an icecream soda glass when the bottom is reached? If the claimed reserves don't really exist, should we begin to worry about running out of oil a lot earlier than some oil company "experts" claim? Gas lines again in our future, but this time permanently?

All the oil there ever was or ever will be was once upon a time solar energy, pressed under thousands of feet of rocks, squeezed out of rancid dinosaur cadavers et al, wilted palm fronds and algae, accumulated over a time longer than one hundred million human lifespans.

We must wait that long again for the next batch. Sorry kids!

The world's human population, heretofore relatively steady for a couple of million years, has recently (during a single human lifespan) explosively jumped from two billion to six billion, tripling in only 72 years. When Grampa Charlie was born in April of 1928 his parents still heated with wood and coal. The world population then was just a fraction over two billion people, but now 71 years later Charlie heats with oil, and the world struggles to support six billion….we have tripled our world numbers during the life time of just one person.

The Population Explosion is not our fault. The mature human male produces 1000 sperm cells every second, or 86,400,000 per day, and is motivated by toxic testosterone, sexually explicit advertising featuring augmented milk glands partially exposed and then to top all that off, prematurely titillated by Congressional information leaked onto the Internet where puberty driven kids can absorb it. Sexual chemistry was not invented by humans….humans were invented by sexual chemistry, put to work in the darkened back seats of ancient four door Chevrolets.

98 percent of fecund American Population does not need to live on the farm, but rather elsewhere, either in the vertical city, or in an insignificant smattering of virtually changeless "quaint" 19^th century villages out in the hinterlands, or in a yeasty ringworm of Urban Sprawl, the interspaces recently chinked with shopping malls. .

Each morning and evening we lonely travelers (located so that sleeping place and working place are randomly and widely separated by a maze…thus they cannot be reached through cooperative traveling devices like trolley cars or car pools) will each grudgingly place an average 175 pound butt inside a 2 ton rolling SUV "container for the thing contained" and set out for the place of business, and then later that same day, back home to the place of family co-habitation. We are auto-enslaved by our freedom-of-choice in locale. Timing this daily migratory tide just right, we all are able to reach the toll booth at almost exactly the same time, inching slowly forward trailing a plume of black unburned hydro-carbons from flatulent tailpipes, until we can surrender a part of our income into the toll basket.

Sing praise, we who live in Fannie May financed housing, to the Government appetite for "pork", which has made all of this dendritic paving possible, and be sure to tithe in the name of your current senatorial or congressional warchestperson….no amount is too large, but most are too small to impress one's name upon those who "represent" you….unless your family name is "Texaco", "Nabisco" or "ADM".

 All the oil there ever was, or ever will be….ah, yes!…once could have been stored in a single humongus tank not much more than 4 miles cubic…four miles on each side. A four mile cube perched on an 8000 mile sphere doesn't make much of an impression when sizes are compared, not as impressive as a grain of salt on the surface of a basketball.

 Since recent 1859 we have drained that tank down to half empty, taking out of it most of the oil which was easiest to get at. When Colonel Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania shortly before President Lincoln was elected, Drake only had to drill down sixty-nine and a half feet, spending less than $1000 on the job. Oil has now become harder to get at. A recent oil drilling platform stuck out in the Atlantic where giant icebergs demand the right-of-way, will search for oil miles below the ocean floor, with the installed cost of that lonely drill rig a mere four billion, two hundred million dollars.

………… EACH!

 Now imagine that four cubic mile tank, now shrunk by pumps to only two miles high, and located almost exclusively under desert sands in the Persian Gulf. And try to imagine what our energy enriched lifestyle would be like…if perhaps Saddam Hussein took a dislike to us.

 This suggests that in time, instead of having the lowest historic gasoline prices, we should be looking forward to every increasing costs at the pump, ad infinitum. Within the easily foreseeable future (for kids now in kindergarten… will they someday be allowed their driver's licenses? And will High Schools need parking lots tomorrow?) they might expect to see a sign on ye local gaspump perhaps demanding $14.99.9 per gallon. And as gas prices go up, so too will home heating oil. Suppose when the oil man comes to my house to fill the furnace oil tank in the fall, will I be able to afford his price of $4,124.73 for the 275 gallons? Will my bank be willing to lend me that amount when I admit to them I intend to BURN IT!? Let us listen for the quiet song of the bowsaw of yesteryear and smell wood dust piling itself around the backyard sawhorse.

How soon this will happen is an unknown. The earliest (if we remain lucky in geo-politics) maybe in about fourteen years, and the furthest away in time?....reality is up to our government's crafty strategists who are wise in the ways of hiding the cost of an F-16 in the price of a loaf of bread. Are we so unaware that we are in danger, so unprepared to take corrective steps in advance, that our Urbanite civilization will go onward for a decade or so a la Thelma & Louise, in over-confident automatic until the oil is "gone", and we are leaderless, wildly directionless, like a freshly decapitated chicken?

"Too late for that now, Margo!"

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