The big push from the hard right is that the solution to our gasoline problem is unlimited drilling in the United States. This is roughly like saying the solution to losing your 100,000 dollar a year job is to fish harder for coins under your couch.

The global consumption of oil is roughly 86.8 million barrels per day. The meme the right is pushing, as always, is ANWR and unrestricted coastal drilling. The best estimates of unrestricted drilling in the US put about 25 billion barrels of oil, which sounds like a great deal, until you realize that this is less than a year of global oil demand. The reality is that the United States is the most drilled in area of the world, having had the petroleum economy more, longer, and harder, than any other place in the world. If there were easy oil to be had, we would have it.

The cost of that effort is not making things that we can sell for oil that is much easier to get at. The cry of ANWR for ever is the Republican Party telling everyone that they have no faith in the American worker, the American entrepreneur, or the free market system. It is them telling everyone that Americans cannot make things the rest of the world wants to buy. Import substitution does not in general work, because it is almost always more expensive than trading, and focusing on what can be done better inside the national unit, rather than trying to do less worse at what it does worst.

Let me repeat that. ANWR forever is a giant middle finger at everyone who works in America at any job that exports.

Now the people who get to drill for that oil need it badly, because it is here, and not someplace else, and in the hands of the government, that they can bully and bribe, and not in the hands of harder to bully and bribe governments. The winners of this, know they are winners. However, the cost for that less than a year of global oil demand, is a great deal of money and effort, and it will not make much of a difference in gasoline prices here in the US for some time. In fact, should we pump oil from ANWR, it will probably be sold to Japan.

So every time you see another right wing con job about ANWR, tell people that that will buy them less than six months. The more germane numbers it that, at current growth rates in demand, there is less than 40 years of oil left in the world from conventional sources. If there is an oil future it is a nonconventional oil future, and that nonconventional future is worse than competing alternatives. Now it isn't that bribe laden, politics soaked entrenched interests can't make the alternatives to petroleum worse, but petroleum is hopelessly compromised, running out, and worse, by objective measures, than a different economic future.

But that is the bullet that no one in the internal combustion for land economy wants to bite: that it is a different future we are talking about - not just changing how we get energy, but changing what we do with it. However, it means not only a radically different structure of the economy, but a change in who runs American industry. And this is what the current political order is fighting to the death. It wants to keep the same people in charge who have driven things to crisis, because they are the people who are in charge. The same bankers, industrialists, politicians, writers, lobbyists, and assorted other elites, who have wildly thrown away a generation on an orgy of consumption, are the ones who are going to stay in power until the last rock of coal is turned into the last barrel of synfuels, to drive the last SUV, to the last development. On that day some other nation will call the dollar worthless paper, and American will go through the radical austerity that Britain did after the collapse of its empire.

Is there a way to prevent this? The answer is yes. Will it be done? The answer is no. Instead we are about to see an administration, Obama or McCain, which is committed to having less of the national effort as public investment, and more as consumption, and investment in consumption. Less as a change to the future, and more for the military, which is consumption and investment in consumption. Both will pass stern laws saying that the next President will have to solve this problem. That's change you can believe in, because it is straight talk. It is not that there are no differences between the candidates, but there is little difference between their campaigns, because both are dialing for dollars, and the dollars, from big or small donors, are from people who want things to stay as they are, only with a few of their problems solved at someone else's expense.

The reality is quite different. Either Presidential nominee will reach December, put their transition team in place, and find out - that the cupboard is bare. That the treasury has been looted, and while the Saudis will lend us a great deal of money to consume, they will lend us far less to get off of our oil addiction. This is the rightward slant of the last 40 years: there is plenty of money for consumption, but far less for investment. So the world has invested in consumption. In itself this is not bad, but without a corresponding investment in supply, that consumption investment is foolish and destined merely to drain the sources of supply harder and sooner.

This is why things such as "cap and trade" are a joke. China and India will not cap, but will trade. Instead of "cap and trade" they should say "crap and raid". Really, it is that bad. If China and India will not cap, then there is nothing to trade. Instead, the cost of carbon must be built into the way money works. The best way to do this is with a Pigou-Tobin tax, where relative externalities are charged in currency trades. This is doable, necessary, and it is even the right moment to do so with the global financial system admittedly in need of alteration. It can be done with existing mechanisms, and through existing operations. That such an obvious idea, which is also workable, and within the frame work of admittedly needed remedy, is not even being discussed, tells us of the complete bankruptcy of the present system of elites.

The accumulation of the next 12 years - because it is at least a 12 year cycle where one failed cautious President will be followed by a swashbuckling Bobby Jindahl type who will give us balls to the wall gas guzzling - will be fiscal crisis in Medicare, a dramatic reduction in American standards of living, and the disruption of American Empire. We could do something about this, but we are not going to do something about this, because the leadership class, set for the next 12 years, is dedicated to not ever doing anything about this under any circumstances, and there is no wave of new leadership ready to take over. The die is cast, Americans have voted repeatedly not to vote on this issue, but instead put whoever is in charge in charge. There we are.

This may sound bleak. In one sense it is, everyone attached to the petroleum economy is going to ride it all the way down. However, the petroleum economy is doomed anyway, and whether it's dinosaurs survive 40 years or 40 1/2 years, in the historical scale of things, is no more important than the month that Louis XIV died in, which most readers of this essay could not name without googling it. He died on September 1st, 1715. But would it have mattered if he had lived until March 1st 1716? No, his era was done.

People want a reason to vote this year, here it is: on the day that the political will is there to go with the current discontent, then there will be institutions in place that will have been built or corrupted. On that day the supreme court will be ready or not to accept the radical changes in law that will be required. On that day there are a host of people who will need to have been educated. Obama, the conservative Democrat, is running for Jimmy Carter's second term, while John McCain is running for Herbert Hoover's second term. Utterly devoid of ideas, utterly devoid of political courage, utterly devoid of vision, the political system picked them, because they had less than any one else.

That is what Americans wanted: two people who promised not to upset the oil drum. And so we have it.