To See It Coming Is Not Enough

"We have the knowledge and materials to protect our water, power and sewage treatment facilities," Jordan says. "It's not going to be cheap, but it would produce enormous numbers of jobs. But it will only happen if the American public conveys that we want to be taxed for this priority."

Ha! The day Americans seek higher taxes, there'll be gators swimming in the streets of the French Quarter. Oh. Right.

Pieces of the solution are already floating around us. Plans to remake Tysons Corner into a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood show that we do not face a binary choice between endless sprawl and a forced return to 19th-century city living. Hybrid engines point toward enormous efficiencies.

The trendy scare story of the moment is peak oil, the growing consensus that we have used up about half the Earth's oil. The downside of the supply slope won't be pretty.

Environmentalist radicals see doom ahead. But even the suits of Big Oil agree on the underlying facts: "Simply put, the era of easy access to energy is over," David O'Reilly, chairman of Chevron, said this year. "We are experiencing the convergence of geological difficulty with geopolitical instability. . . . The time when we could count on cheap oil and even cheaper natural gas is clearly ending."

This weekend marks the beginning of that end. See you on the gas lines.

Join me at noon today for "Potomac Confidential" athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.