There are certain jobs in this world that even in my most Walter Mitty-ish moments of grand self-delusion I would not want and would not accept. Right now running one of the Big Three US car companies is pretty near the top of that list, probably second only to being US president for the next four years.

The Big Three are all facing the same basic issue: Thanks to the rising price of gasoline, the subprime mortgage blowout, and the all-but-official recession, the rules of the game have not only changed and in a particularly inconvenient way, but they’ve changed far faster than anyone at those companies anticipated.

Yes, you can make the argument, as I have numerous times, that they set themselves up for this debacle. They shunned hybrids and they exhibited the absolute worst of the short-term mind set that we all beat up many US companies for. In this case, they willingly embraced an absurd reliance on light trucks (pickups, SUV’s, and minivans), because of their higher profit margins. Now that circumstances–some foreseeable, some not–have made the competitive landscape lurch in a way that strongly favors less expensive and far more fuel efficient vehicles, they were caught with all their weight (and product mix) on the wrong foot. But rather than dwell on that series of miscalculations, let me focus on what comes next.

I’m sure that by now the top brass at the Big Three have gotten the message–less oil consumed and less CO2 emitted per mile will be the two guiding principles for their business for the next several decades. Peak oil and global warming are not going away, and they will have numerous, overlapping, and major influences on the life of everyone on this planet for a very long time.

The question, of course, is how do you, Mr. Car Exec, get your company to that post-oil, cleaner future intact?

“Wait!”, I imagine many of you yelling, “Aren’t you the guy who’s always telling us about all the things we can do save a lot of gasoline right now? And don’t you prattle on endlessly about the coming wave of electrification of personal transportation?” Yes, I am, and thank you for paying attention. The issue at hand is largely not the technology, but keeping the companies alive while they make that transition.

We have a huge and terrifying conceptual gap hanging over the peak oil situation. Oil industry experts and the IEA are talking openly about there being an “oil crunch” around 2012, and I’ve heard from several people with high level contacts that the operating assumption in many large corporations and other organizations is that we’re headed for a 2011/2012 oil peak. But who among the non-experts you live and work and associate with know what’s coming? How many of them think that our current “high” oil prices are nothing more than another “spike” that will subside and we’ll all be tooling around on $2/gallon gasoline again? Further, how many are absolutely convinced, right down to their DNA, that the current prices are nothing more than “the oil companies screwing us again”, and that things will be fine once we get those two oil men out of the White House next January? I’ve heard one variation or another of that view from more people than I can count.

Our politicians are utterly useless on this front, of course. They talk about global warming (good) and “achieving energy independence” (completely bogus), with only a vanishingly small percentage of them daring to let the dreaded phrase “peak oil” cross their lips.

It’s easy to see why the pols and the pundits and the CEO’s don’t talk about this more openly–it’s big and very scary and they don’t want to tank the economy far worse than our current situation. Imagine if Bush gave a speech in which he said that peak oil was coming in just four years, less than the average time a household owns a new car. What would you see? High MPG cars (new and used) would instantly be selling at a huge premium, low MPG vehicles would tank in resale value and would be almost impossible to move off the showroom floor. But the knee-jerk reaction wouldn’t end there, and we’d see the jolt to the economy and the mind set of consumers go much further. Rich people would install gasoline tanks on their property and try to hoard gasoline or heating oil, people would rush to take overseas trips while they could still fly, sales of guns would be off the charts, and the purchasing patterns for nearly all durable goods would be warped almost beyond recognition. One can barely imagine the reaction in some parts of the Internet.

But that Grand Revelation won’t happen, of course. Instead, we’ll continue to ease up the oil production curve to the peak like passengers on a roller coaster climbing that first big hill, and many of us will continue to buy trucks. As a result, we’ll have an enormous number of brand new trucks infesting the fleet of US vehicles on the day peak oil arrives, a large portion of them discretionary purchases, meaning they were not bought out of business or other genuine need but purely as part of the truck fad that has yet to burn itself out in the US.

As gasoline prices continue to rise, the resale value of those F-150, RAMs, and Silverados, plus the dozens of SUV models and (to a lesser extent) minivans, will decline, and if there is a tipping point in the mainstream awareness of peak oil, those prices could plummet. Even so, once we’re beyond the peak and gasoline prices get exceedingly interesting, we’ll still be stuck with those millions of trucks on the road that were sold since 2000. That needless inefficiency amounts to an enormous, worldwide truck tax (oil being a fungible commodity) that we’ll all pay for, whether directly or indirectly, via higher prices for gasoline and fuel efficient vehicles as people bail out of trucks they can no longer afford to drive.

So, for the good of the country as well as themselves, the Big Three should shift their development and production heavily toward smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles, right? That’s the problem: Through their endless advertising they’ve helped create that warped, myopic mind set among consumers, the one that says everything will go back to “normal”, the oil companies are “screwing us”, etc. Consumers don’t know what’s coming, they don’t want to know, and the car companies were delighted to keep selling them the truck myth.

As a result, the Big Three have to keep selling those high profit margin trucks and ridiculous things like the Mustang and the reborn Camaro to stay afloat even as they scramble to develop the Volt and promote E85-compatible vehicles (more for PR value than anything else until cellulosic technology goes mainstream).

And while this is far from a perfect solution, it’s likely the best one available, a classic example of the optimal path not being a particularly good one. We need as many car companies as possible working on these problems, including the Big Three. It’s not in anyone’s best interest to see any of them disappear, not theirs, not their employees’, not their suppliers’, not even their competition’s.

The price the US consumers will pay for their willful (and assisted) ignorance, and to keep the Big Three from becoming the Big Two or even the Big One, will be painfully high, but that’s the path we’re locked onto.

Unless, of course, enough people wake up and start to take action now, before we hit the peak and those much higher oil prices arrive. We may have long ago squandered our opportunity to make a comfortable transition away from our oil dependence, but we still can greatly soften the blow.