OK, so if you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably noticed you’re paying a lot more to fill up your tank these days, and I don’t just mean the M-1s still kicking around Afghanistan and hopefully not crossing the border into Iran anytime soon.  Now, perhaps you, like me, are among the lucky ones with access to public transportation and haven’t felt the squeeze directly at the pump, but that doesn’t mean you’re immune to the effects of rising fuel prices.  It also means you’re paying more for access to basic necessities like food that are intimately tied to the prices for oil and oil-derived inputs, something you probably can’t afford given that real wages have stagnated and even declined in recent years, unless of course you happen to be among the extremely lucky at the top of the economic ladder.

What’s really going on here, anyway?  If you’ve been tuning in to what passes for debates among presidential candidates like Newt “Amateur Paleontologist” Gingrich and Mitt “Coupla Cadillacs” Romney, you might be under the impression that environmentalists restricting access to “vast supplies of cheap oil” offshore, in Canada and in shale plays like the Bakken and Marcellus are responsible for the recent rise in gas prices.  On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi and some of her colleagues on the Democratic side have recently been in the habit of blaming “speculators” on Wall Street for artificially inflating prices through their trading.  A quick examination of the facts reveals such scapegoating claims on both sides to be full of enough baloney to feed a moon colony for years.  The key underlying drivers of prices are in fact the same fundamental economic and geological factors as always, with a little help, it’s true, from above-ground happenings like unrest and political instability in key oil-producing areas, most notably the Middle East, but perhaps soon Russia as well.

There are lots of factors that feed into the ultimate price of oil and how it trickles down into the rest of the economy, but the most important thing for everyone to understand is that rising global demand for a finite and shrinking resource is a recipe for prices to rise, and quickly.  Oil is the foundation of the global economy, which has operated for as long as we can remember under the assumption that there would always be more than enough to go around, and at prices cheap as free.  This assumption is simply no longer valid, and the economy has begun to adjust to the new reality.  Of course, anyone who was paying attention over the years knew this day would eventually come to pass, but still the public and media cry like children, or possibly drug addicts, begging those in power to open the spigots just a little more so we can at least pretend it’s still business as usual.  The problem is there is no way to do so for anything other than a brief moment at best.  The spigots are open all the way, and everyone who can do so is producing full throttle.  The passing of peak oil several years ago, but more importantly, the passing of peak global net export availability, marks the key transition from a buyer’s to a seller’s market.  If you were wondering why Big Oil today has the American public by the balls like never before, you now have your answer.

Wait a minute, you might ask; what about those aforementioned vast domestic supplies of energy?  What about Saudi Arabia; don’t they have the ability to produce as much oil as we could ever want at a moment’s notice?  What about all those vast undrilled areas offshore?  What about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?  Surely there must be something we can do, right?

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, not really.  Yes, there is plenty of oil in the ground, but the part that people really need to understand better is that the cheap oil is gone, burned up and now floating as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  What is left is expensive, slow to discover and even slower to produce, and more and more of it is being eaten up every day by China, India, Brazil and the rest of the developing world as their economies continue to grow at a breakneck pace.

All right, then why do we seem to keep hearing so much from right-wingers about the supposed easy answers we are avoiding?  Well, the most important thing to understand about today’s Republican Party, especially after the stunningly bad court decision a few years ago in Citizens United, is that it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate plutocracy, and nobody does more to underwrite their regressive politics than the coal, oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, Exxon-Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the big utilities and mining interests.   Everything you hear a Republican politician say, and yes, a lot of what you hear Democratic politicians say too these days is colored in some way by oil.  The best policy for you as a critically thinking voter is to recognize this fact and discount their credibility accordingly when you see them quoted in media outlets.  There are still some good ways to follow the money and figure out why which politicians advocate which policies, particularly websites like Open Secrets that lay the facts as bare as they can be laid.  And remember that the resources these forces have available to spend on shrewd campaigns to market their twisted notions should not be underestimated, so it is probably best to completely tune out any information that comes at you in advertisement form.  This may have something to do with why you keep hearing so much blather about the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands-derived synthetic crude from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries for export, or the out-of-proportion focus on the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a naked attempt by entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine the credibility of the solar industry and nip in the bud a meager threat at the margins to the massive profitability of fossil fuels.

As for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the idea that this could possibly constitute a meaningful hedge against rising prices is utterly laughable.  The reserve was designed as a stopgap measure to keep oil flowing in case of short-term supply disruption due to political factors, not to supplant declining net exports on the scale of what we buy from the rest of the world or to compensate for the increased cost of drilling for oil in shale as compared to traditional, conventional oilfields.  And while limiting Wall Street speculation on commodity futures through heightened oversight and regulation may be a good idea for other reasons and could have some impact on limiting price volatility, it will do nothing to address the fundamentals at play behind rising prices.

Given that both sides of the political spectrum continue to make empty promises and ignore the real issues at play here, what are some real actions we can take from a policy standpoint or as consumers to protect our wallets and loosen the oil industry’s death grip on the global economy?  There is actually quite a lot we can do.  For one thing, we need to stay focused on long-term solutions to address the long-term drivers, and that means limiting demand through meaningful investments in nonpetroleum transportation infrastructure and substitutes for petroleum inputs in industry.  We can take measures to limit our own consumption and to collectively build an economy that does not require constantly expanding consumption of petroleum and other finite resources for people to thrive, something we will ultimately need to do to have any hope of survival on this rock.  These are all topics big and important enough that it would be a disservice to attempt to cover them in detail here, so I will save further discussion for another time.

And we can also avoid going down the absolute worst path for everyday people around the world: sanctions on Iran or other oil-producing countries that do little to harm their corrupt governments but plenty to harm their people, or the next step that many on Capitol Hill seem to be pushing for these days of military action, a move that can frankly only be described, in Gingrichian terms, as profoundly idiotic.

So the next time someone tries to insult your intelligence by suggesting there is an easy answer to rising oil prices, an answer that doesn’t require any real work or sacrifice, you can go ahead and show them where they can stick it.  A hole in the ground might not be the worst idea after all.

Houston, you have a problem!