So it is written in the book of Daniel, chapter five, that King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for 1,000 of his nobles and drank wine with them in debauchery that rivaled others in the Bible.

But the King of Babylon was living on borrowed time. As his entourage of vassals and concubines gorged themselves, a disembodied hand made the writing on the wall that sealed the king’s fate.

Like Belshazzar, North Americans are also looking at our own handwriting on the wall, or in this case, on the signs high above our heads — $2.50 a gallon US, $1 a litre CDN.

One is tempted, especially with Americans, to recall Daniel’s translation of the wall writing for Belshazzar — we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; the kingdom is divided and cannot stand.

While President George W. Bush takes August off avoiding Cindy Sheehan at his ranch in Crawford, Texas (who says this President can’t appreciate a French working schedule) so too Americans are avoiding the grim reality of peak oil.

We worry about many things, we Americans, mostly trivial. We have a problem connecting the dots. We know what gas cost in 1999, in 2003 and now. We were told oil would flow from Iraqi wells and not only pay for the war but also bring back the good old days of $1.09-a-gallon gas.

We were lectured about noble sacrifices and bringing “democracy” to the Middle East. Our President said we were attacked on 9-11 and so we had to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. We were told that this wasn’t a war on Islam but you’d never know it now.

The price of everything connected with crude oil continues to rise. Bodies continue to come home in flag draped coffins. There is a disquieting stirring out there in the heartland — something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. and Mrs. America?

Gently, like a falling safe, the realities of peak oil, the point at which we’ve taken half of all the oil there is out of the Earth, are being felt. And when the reality hits, the “non-negotiable” American way of life may come crashing down like a house of cards.

News about peak oil theory, once reserved for websites like From The Wilderness, is now making it into mainstream U.S. newspapers. Noted oil geologists like Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes are now finding a receptive audience, largely because one U.S. congressman, Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, hammered the implications of peak oil into the members of the House of Representatives a few months ago.

Bartlett’s presentation and sobering analysis finally made it possible for the mainstream to take peak oil seriously.

(And while we’re at it, consider that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney isn’t coming to tour the oil sands of Alberta in September just because the Fraser Institute puts on a good spread.)

Here is what is at stake:

While it might be comforting that there is still half of all the oil left in the ground to be had, extracting that oil will be far more difficult and costly than the easy crude we’ve been living on.

Modern civilization runs on cheap oil — everything from plastics, many pharmaceuticals, the fertilizers that make modern farming possible, the computer that you are reading this story on, all of it is dependent on oil as a base substance. As crude rises, so does everything derived from it.

The entire economy also depends on the suburban lifestyle and the automobile culture that sustains it. Many analysts are warning about the coming burst of the real estate bubble — that will be fueled as higher gas prices make commuting 20, 30, 40 miles or more a day to work a less desirable proposition.

Supply chains that depend on cheap oil are already creaking. Wal-Mart added to the writing on the wall last week with an unprecedented profit warning to Wall Street. What can’t be shipped from overseas cheap becomes a drag on the bottom line. The ripple effects to the U.S. and Canadian economies are just beginning. We are seeing the twilight of cheap running shoes and much more.

Transportation, housing, retail commerce — the stuff of modern civilization that we have taken for granted for so long — is under strain. Progress, commerce, endless suburban expansion: our lifestyle has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Will the American people come to realize that it was never Saddam Hussein, it was never weapons of mass destruction, it was never 9-11 but it was, at long last and after every other lie has been exhausted oil — oil — that caused the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

And the U.S. will not leave Iraq — it can’t leave. Not when we’re sitting on the country housing the second largest proven oil reserves left on Earth. Without oil, the U.S. implodes like a punctured tire.

Linda McQuaig (It’s the Crude, Dude) put two and two together last year and now from Saratoga Springs, New York, James Howard Kunstler lays out to his fellow Americans in all its gory detail what Americans can expect as the oil runs out in his latest book, The Long Emergency.

But among Americans, few are willing to utter the magic three-letter word as the ultimate rationale for what we are doing in Iraq and the Middle East.

Part of it I feel is, in the American mind, it’s unseemly to be offering up the lives of our sons and daughters for something as unromantic as oil. But nevertheless, every time Mr. and Mrs. America hop in their Lincoln Navigator and drive two miles down the street to the local McDonald’s drive-through, they should thank the souls of 1,800+ dead U.S. soldiers who continue to stand guard over what we perceive as our birthright.

Ironically, those troops are putting their lives on the line for our way of life, just as assuredly as if they were fighting terrorists blowing up shopping malls in California.

But all George Bush’s horses and men cannot change immutable natural laws. There is only so much oil left in the ground. We can destroy the world fighting over the last drops (which seems to be U.S. policy) or we can get down to the business of building a new world that depends on the shared responsibilities of people toward each other and our natural resources.

And George Bush’s kingdom of oil is, as Daniel might have said, divided — red state/blue state, pro-war/anti-war — and still almost totally ignorant about peak oil. This house, divided against itself and running on borrowed time, cannot long endure in its current form.

For Bush and America, like Belshazzar and Babylon, the hour is growing late.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...