Oil Crisis

Riddles, Enigmas, and Gordian Knots – Working Our Way Toward the Heart of the Oil Crisis

Used a thousand different ways for a thousand different occasions, Winston Churchill’s legendary statement, “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” seems especially apt for this amazingly strange phenomenon we call ‘the oil crisis’. We cannot find anyone who actually can explain it in any way that makes sense, but we intend to keep exploring – just like geologists searching for rich new fields – until we can make sense of the oil crisis for ourselves.

We have conducted some informal polling. The ordinary guy at the gas station explains, “The oil crisis is that thing that makes it so I can’t fill up my truck all the way to full.” A local economics professor invokes the law of supply and demand, saying, “The world’s demand for oil keeps increasing as China and India industrialize and become major players in world commerce. The oil producing nations control the supply, adjusting how much they produce and export to keep the price relatively constant – the highest it can be without breaking the bank.” Some shopping mall speculators assert, “The oil crisis broke the American economy. All the American wealth got spent on oil.”

Oil Politics

We suspect all three “experts” are absolutely correct – each in his own way. And we also strongly suspect that the real answer is still more than the sum of these three parts. We also harbor an uneasy suspicion that we’re asking the wrong question: instead of wondering what it is, we ought to get busy answering “What will we do about the oil crisis?”

We have lived with the alleged oil crisis for nearly fifty years, and every President since Nixon has given his solemn assurance we would break our dependence on foreign oil. The next guy who makes that same solemn promise will hear a resounding chorus of, “Yeah, good luck with that.”

At the heart of the crisis, we have a fundamental problem of belief and trust because the whole idea of an oil crisis depends on the assumption that the world is rapidly running out of oil. We read statements like, “We have only enough fossil fuel to last fifty years.” But not everyone agrees with the basic premise. Some so-called experts authoritatively assert, “We have all the fossil fuels we need; we just need to be wiser about production and use.”

Meanwhile, the guy at the gas station still cannot afford to fill-up his tank, and for him, that’s a genuine crisis.

As our site grows, diversifies, and evolves, Automotive Industry News plans to strip away the mystery and begin exploring promising solutions. We’re willing to explore how new internal-combustion technologies may ease the crisis, but we look forward to examining far more powerful alternatives – the permanent solutions that will relegate the oil crisis to history. Our reporters and analysts strongly suspect that the resolution to the problem looks a lot like the solution to the legendary Gordian Knot: we won’t unravel it. We’ll just cut right through it.