Surprise! It’s all about oil.

We tend to think of ourselves in a multi-modal, 21st century post-industrial world with ease and diversity, free of the heavy industry straitjacket of the world before 1980. The days of contested spheres of influence have been replaced by craftily written agreements and wars fought over far-flung natural resources have been left behind in the bloody twentieth century and the British Empire before it. After all, the base concerns of whirring machinery are nothing to the miraculous simultaneity of the wireless web, aren’t they?

Unfortunately not. As everyone has by now realized, without gasoline (or its helpmate diesel) or kerosene, it is impossible to get out of Houston. The problem with this crude commodity is its sheer ubiquity. Our post-urban world is entirely predicated on the easy availability of petroleum. I once saw Charlie Rose interview the chairman of ExxonMobil (headquartered just up the highway from Ken’s house) and he pointed out that perhaps the biggest problem with any and all sources of alternative energy was distribution; he quoted exactly how many retail fuel stations there are in the U.S., and it was some staggering number in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions. Think about it: there’s a gas station in nearly every street in every American town or city. As the storage capacity of each of these really isn’t very large, they require a tanker truck to visit at least bi-daily, and these tanker trucks need to make continual trips to central depots which must be in turn supplied continually by pipelines coming from relatively few places, most notably (in a fit of overwhelming and hilarious irony) Houston. Take out just one element in the process, whether it be electricity to the pipelines or roads for the tankers, and you’ve got maybe a day and a half of supply under normal use and whatever residual supply is left in the tanks of individual vehicles – and that’s under unremarkable normal use.

Ever since Winston Churchill made his fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy to the wonder fuel [read The Prize by Daniel Yergin] the civilized world has been putting more and more of its eggs in the basket of high-density liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Things have now reached the point where most people in the older cities (New York, Chicago) and, well, everybody in the newer cities (Dallas, Los Angeles) can’t work or buy food without the operation of the complex dance of fuel supply. It’s not just individuals either: as Witold Rybinski is fond of quoting, car cities are truck cities. If the fuel stops, everything stops.

Is this the price we pay for on-demand and just-in-time efficiency? We live in a world where being a pedestrian is really no longer an option. Whether it’s war with China over Indonesia’s fields, or stunting India’s growth so that San Jose will continue to operate, it looks like the same old scarcity is here to stay.

I wonder how the supply chain worked with horses . . . . .