Break Out the Bicycles: Oil is Running Out, But the West Would Rather Wage Wars than Consider Other Energy Sources: "Some people have wacky ideas,' the new Republican campaign ad alleges. 'Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry.' Cut to a shot of men in suits riding bicycles.

"Sadly, the accusation is false. Kerry has been demanding that the price of oil be held down. He wants George Bush to release supplies from the strategic reserve and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has been warning the American people that if the president doesn't act soon, he and Dick Cheney will have to share a car to work. Men riding bicycles and sharing cars? Is there no end to this madness? Like the fuel protests that rose and receded in Britain last week, these exchanges are both moronic and entirely rational."

"The age of cheap oil is over.... The oil industry tells us not to worry: the market will find a way of sorting this out. If the price of energy rises, new sources will come onstream. But new sources of what? Every other option is much more expensive than the cheap oil that made our economic complexity possible.... If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain, our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they collapse. This isn't very likely to happen. Faced with a choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars to keep the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the west's rising need and the vulnerability of the pipeline and tanker networks, will respond with their own oil wars."

Break Out the Bicycles: Oil is Running Out, But the West Would Rather Wage Wars than Consider Other Energy Sources: "Some people have wacky ideas,' the new Republican campaign ad alleges. 'Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry.' Cut to a shot of men in suits riding bicycles.

"Sadly, the accusation is false. Kerry has been demanding that the price of oil be held down. He wants George Bush to release supplies from the strategic reserve and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has been warning the American people that if the president doesn't act soon, he and Dick Cheney will have to share a car to work. Men riding bicycles and sharing cars? Is there no end to this madness? Like the fuel protests that rose and receded in Britain last week, these exchanges are both moronic and entirely rational."

"The age of cheap oil is over.... The oil industry tells us not to worry: the market will find a way of sorting this out. If the price of energy rises, new sources will come onstream. But new sources of what? Every other option is much more expensive than the cheap oil that made our economic complexity possible.... If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain, our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they collapse. This isn't very likely to happen. Faced with a choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars to keep the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the west's rising need and the vulnerability of the pipeline and tanker networks, will respond with their own oil wars."