A small bonfire last night in the moonlight. The early evening remained warm, though clear of fog. Many people coming to the beach this time of year makes me weary to leave home on weekends and go get mixed up in all the traffic. Gasoline prices are once again on their summer march upward. Perhaps some day soon we will all be stuck within bicycling distance of where we live. I notice groceries prices have risen significantly in the big box stores. I suspect increased transportation costs may be the cause.

Should fuel shortages visit us in the future, as I have long anticipated, I don't think civilization could handle the change very well. People, including myself, have become too dependent on cheap and abundant energy. I see more freeways being built or widened, and more large, over-sized SUVs and pick-up trucks on the road, while at the same time see many new tiny vehicles mixing in with the gradually slowing traffic, as well. It seems that society is confused about which way to go with respect to energy consumption.

Sadly, I am contributing to the problem of diminishing gasoline, as I love to get out and romp around the countryside in an automobile. The sense of freedom I get from being able to hop in a car and be ten miles from my house in ten minutes, or a thousand miles away in 16 hours, is a piece of my life I would find difficult to do without. And yet, California freeways are so gummed up with traffic these days, that I often think a nice road bicycle and strong set of legs would deliver far greater pleasure and convenience.

The price of a barrel of oil jumped to $108 this past week, causing prices at the pump to jump 12 percent. Hurricane season is coming to the gulf and social unrest continues to spread throughout the mid east, a couple of factors that influence the cost of gasoline. When I see prices jump as they have been doing, it carries my mind back to the oil embargoes of 1973 and 1977. What a scary mess those times were for those who had to wait in long lines and then only have ten gallons available for purchase on odd or even days.

At that time I thought we were at the end of the gasoline era, but the crises went away when more new oil sources were discovered and the politics was settled, so the state of panic that many of us experienced in that decade slowly went away. A lot of political rhetoric got tossed around in those years. Most memorable was President Jimmy Carter's speech in which he said that America's need to tackle the energy crisis was the moral equivalent of war (MEOW).

We drilled more and made automobiles slightly more efficient, but never solved our problem of relying on oil, particularly that imported from the corners of the world where we are not well liked. I'm not convinced that the latest estimates of the amount of oil in the ground is a reliable number. A quick look on the web tells me the world has about another 25 years worth of liquid fuels to use at the current rate of consumption. If I'm alive then, I'll be about 90 years old, probably too frail to pedal a bicycle anywhere. I imagine life will get more interesting as we approach the end of this 25 years. I think most of the good hiding spots in the world have already been taken.