MYTH: Gas prices are going through the roof.

TRUTH: Gasoline is a bargain.

The media periodically get upset about "record" gas prices.

"The price of gasoline has risen again to a record high!" said one newscaster in 2004. "The high prices are making it harder for some to keep their heads above water," said another.

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We should marvel at how cheap gasoline is-what a bargain we get from oil companies. After all, it's easy to bottle water, but think about what it takes to produce and deliver gasoline. Oil has to be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from deep beneath an ocean. To get to the oil, the drills often have to bend and dig sideways through as much as five miles of earth. What they find then has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three or more different formulas of gasoline and transported in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each. Then your local gas station must spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure you don't blow yourself up. At $2.26 a gallon (about forty-six cents of which goes to taxes), gas is miraculously cheap! But what we heard from the clueless media was, "Gas prices are at record highs!"

MYTH: We are running out of oil fast.

TRUTH: Not so fast!

"It's going to be a catastrophe!"

When they're not complaining about the price of gas, doomsayers would have us believe that we are burning oil at an "unsustainable" rate.

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If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come up with alternative energy sources or better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At fifty dollars a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their book The Bottomless Well that those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.

But the media don't pay much attention to that. Not running out of oil is not a very interesting story.

Arrogance...We are fools to think we have that much influence on how this world works, one way or the other. At best, we only have a modest impact on our own existence.

We think far too highly of ourselves. Mother Nature hiccups, and we all buy the farm. Whether plastic bags take a year or a hundred or even a thousand to decompose, what difference will that make in the long run? If we ran out of oil tomorrow, how would that make any difference to how humanity will funtion 500 years from now? Any of these might be a temporary setback for us now, but the eventuality is that none of these things will make any difference over the long run, except maybe to force us to develop technologies a little bit faster to deal with the inconveniences.

Economics isn't really a natural science, any more than politics is.

I kind of agree. In the near term future, our lives specifically may be very much changed. If we suddenly had absolutley no petroleum products tomorrow, then our lives would change drastically. I'd be OK for a while. But many, including myself, would need to make some longterm changes to how I live, or I would not live. Many of us would not be able to make those changes, and because of that many would perish. But some would be able to make those changes. Some people would survive. There are areas in which most of the people still live a subsistence lifestyle, without a lot of dependence on petroleum. Provided enough can survive to maintain a population that can reproduce, the human race should still be here.