Joe Romm touched on a critical point in a post at Climate Progress this morning, “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us”:

Equally important, conservatives now have a very potent political issue to beat back advocates of an economy-wide cap & trade system — high gasoline prices. And gasoline prices are probably going to be much higher over the next few years (see “Must read CIBC report: $7 gas by 2010, 10 million cars off the road, 1970s style GDP growth“). That is one reason I would leave transportation out of an economy-wide cap & trade, but that will be the subject of another post.

As I said on CP in response to that post, this is one of the things I feared the most, that our sense of urgency about GW and the pain of higher oil prices would arrive simultaneously and cause policy paralysis. If we’re not at that point as one might conclude from many of the examples Joe cites in his post, we’re way too close (and getting close) for comfort.

This is a big deal because of the way large groups of people, most notably Americans in this shiny, happy 21st century, deal with major crises. We have a terribly hard time dealing more than one Big Conceptual Issue at a time, and both global warming and peak oil certainly qualify as BCI’s. Even worse is how hard it can be to get us to focus on action now to avert a catastrophic, but not yet present, Issue 2 when Issue 1 is not just big and scary, but hitting us hard in our weekly finances right now.[1]

On top of this foundation of psychological weirdness is everyone’s favorite nasty detail: Perception is reality. Most notably for our purposes GW and PO have taken very different paths through the obstacle course that is public perception space, paths that I suspect virtually no one would have predicted 10 years ago.

Global warming made the leap from science geek and enviro issue to a widely recognized, and even largely accepted, mainstream concept thanks almost entire to An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, many other people have been shouting about this topic for a long time, including some people I respect greatly, like Bill McKibben and James Hansen, plus we’ve seen tireless contributions to this effort from organizations like the NRDC and Greenpeace. And all this happened before the people who were educated and/or convinced were directly affected by global warming. Sure, Uncle Al and others had some compelling imagery to work with–stranded polar bears, disappearing glaciers, US state-size chucks of Antarctica breaking off, implications of more and stronger hurricanes–but the considerable conceptual progress we’ve seen has all been at a distance, with the consequences removed, in both space and time, from those people undergoing a shift in the world view.

Peak oil is a nearly opposite situation. The effects are being felt right here, right now, and in ways that mainstream consumers and voters can’t ignore. So surely people would be clamoring for information about peak oil, and then pressuring their politicians to take appropriate action, right? Of course that hasn’t happened; we have no Al Gore, with or without his nifty presentation and movie, and we have endless debate about What’s Really Causing High Oil Prices, which only feeds the populist streak in Americans as well as our DNA-level belief in infinity. We can’t be running out of cheap oil! There’s plenty of it in the ground! It’s just OPEC or Exxon or Bush or the New World Order or Speculators screwing us again!

Public perception seems to have solidified. The mainstream public sees global warming as a real problem we’ll just have to ignore for now while we get those oil prices down. Peak oil isn’t even on their radar screen, and to the extent people have even heard of it nearly all of them are convinced it’s nothing more than just another of those Internet-fueled conspiracy theories.[2] I’ve said for a long time that peak oil needed our own equivalent of Al Gore, but I think it’s too late for anyone to fill that role.

The biggest problem here is not the disparity of perception about global warming vs. peak oil, but how those two things interact, as Joe Romm pointed out. People are so squeezed by higher energy prices that they’re demanding their elected representatives Do Something Right Now, and I pity the politician who supports a policy that his or her opponent can paint as being a new tax, no matter how well thought out and necessary the policy might be.

What a startling chain reaction. We become global warming aware, but then peak oil keeps us from taking serious action on global warming, and that budding awareness of global warming is at least partly to blame for our inability to deal with peak oil (that “only one crisis at a time” thing).

How do we break that cycle and shun our comfort zone and deal with these twin problems in realistic terms? How much can we expect mainstream consumers and voters to change and pressure their elected representatives? Or is the answer simply to hope that we elect people who know what’s going on, haven’t been bought by special interests, and are willing to do unpopular things that are in everyone’s long-term best interest? I don’t know, and that’s a mix of questions I’m thinking about more than ever not just in connection with my writing here, but also in my current book project, where I’m currently deciding how much of a “crash course in energy analysis” I should include as an explicit section.

[1] This is not to say that I think American consumers are being selfish or too wrapped up in their personal finances. If anything, more attention and careful planning on that front would have helped lessen the impact of the current mess.

[2] The fact that so many people think peak oil is a conspiracy theory and that the “real” explanation is one of their quarter-baked fantasies about a New World Order or oil companies ruling the world (i.e. keeping 100MPG cars off the road), surely deserves to be a first-ballot entry into the Irony Hall of Fame. And yes, I blame both the Cornucopians and the Apocalypticons for much of this mess. One camp is telling us there’s no underlying problem, which leaves people to conclude it’s someone just screwing us again, while the other is so overblown with their rhetoric that they’re too easily characterized as being another clueless, harmless, and ignorable Internet cult.