As of this writing, we don’t know whether Congressman Simpson’s CIEDRA bill, which would — among other things — designate a Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness, will become law. The motorized off-road and snowmobiler constituencies seem to oppose it as now written. Several ranchers who were hoping that the final package would include a buyout of range allotments have been disappointed. (Frankly, I thought they had more clout than that. Perhaps they did, too.) Custer County salivates at the thought of several thousand acres of public land to privatize and tax. The city of Stanley is said to be considering using some of its added real estate to construct affordable housing.

    Much of the conservation community of Idaho appears to have decided that any amount of newly protected wild land is a good thing, and that the perfect should not become the enemy of the good. However, considering the current administration’s penchant for dealing with laws by either ignoring them or by promulgating regulations that skirt the intention of those laws, perhaps such optimism is premature.    

    I understand why people who think they ought to be able to ride their four-wheelers everywhere in the Boulder-White Clouds dislike CIEDRA. It would close some trails to them. But what in the name of Exxon Mobil makes them think that they’ll be able, five or ten years down the road, to even afford the gasoline or diesel to pour into the pickup trucks that pull the trailers that haul their four-wheelers and snowmobiles to the trailheads? We all know what motor fuel costs now, but perhaps the riders of snowmobiles and fourwheelers and motorbikes haven’t heard that threedollars-a-gallon is just the beginning.

    Much of the world’s supply of oil comes from a handful of giant fields. For example, one of the largest fields in the world is Mexico’s Cantarell. Pemex, the state-owned oil monopoly, recently announced that this year’s production ˜ 1.86 million barrels a day ˜ will be 8% less than last year’s. Cantarell is now in decline.

    The very largest oil field in the world is Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia. Depending on which reports one believes, production at Ghawar is somewhere between 3 and 5 million barrels per day. We do know that Ghawar is over sixty years old and is now receiving heavy injections of sea water to maintain pressure in the wells. In the past few months, total oil production from Saudi Arabia has declined by 400,000 barrels a day. The Saudis are now hiring every spare drilling rig in the world, even stripping rigs from the Gulf of Mexico that managed to survive the 2005 hurricane season. Where have we seen something similar before? In Texas, after 1973, when oil had tripled in price. The new Texas wells produced a lot of oil, true, but never again did production reach the levels of 1971, when Texas — and the lower 48 states as a whole — produced more oil than they ever had before or ever would again. All oil wells, all oil fields, all oilproducing countries see their production rise to a peak and then decline. Technology can sometimes slow that decline, but it cannot reverse it. In 1971 the lower 48 states produced over 9 million barrels of oil a day. Today they produce about 5 million. The problem? We consume almost 22 million barrels a day, a quarter of world production.

    World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. New finds are smaller — think of your back yard where you always step in the biggest pile of dog poop first. If Ghawar is indeed beginning its long decline, then so is the world. Mind you, hitting the peak of production — some oil analysts think it happened in 2005 — doesn’t mean “running out” of oil. What is does mean is that production will no longer grow. It also means that the only remedy for rising prices is falling demand. Oil consumption in the U.S. now grows at 2% a year. At that rate, in 35 years we would be using 44 million barrels a day.

    Gasoline broke the three dollar barrier in Salmon a couple of weeks ago. At the station where I usually fill up, the owner just got a scare — his Montana distributor tells him that his next delivery may be late — he’s having trouble lining up supplies himself.

    On hot summer nights in Leadore, an open window brings the roar of a neighbor’s diesel pump, turning an irrigation center pivot. The energy expended far outweighs the food energy in the harvested crop. At the moment, the rancher can afford to do this because he has a large outside income. He would like to switch to electricity, but Leadore is at the end of a power line, and the electricity coursing through the lines is finite, too, and even now sometimes doesn’t carry enough power to turn all the pivots on all the ranches.

    Ranching as practiced in Idaho today requires large amounts of imported electricity, diesel, gasoline, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. Only 50,000 Americans own more than 50 cows. Most beef growers use off-farm income or inherited wealth to support their herds. As fuel costs rise, and as all other materials made with fossil fuels rise in proportion, ranchers will try to reduce their energy use, but overall they face a convergence of circumstances that will make raising a northern European animal in the arid West less and less attractive.

    As for Custer County, what will high fuel costs do to the demand for vacation homes and to the tourist trade in general? The existence of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and the Sawtooth NRA, far from being a drag on economic development, has attracted new residents and prevented Custer County from being depopulated a la eastern Montana. But with continued planetary warming, winter snowpack will decline, water resources will diminish, and large forest fires will increase, even as the cost of maintaining the highways that bring people to Custer County becomes prohibitive.

    (As I finished writing this, word came of the shutdown of the Prudhoe Bay pipeline. Replacing that 400,000 barrels a day will be expensive and will involve lots of ocean-going tankers at a time when strong world demand has caused a tanker shortage. We are about to find out just how much of a cushion the world’s oil producers have.)

Louise Wagenknecht is an author, activist, and WWP Board Member.  She lives in Leadore, Idaho.