It's a big government report, with charts and graphs. If you've ignored every other technical paper from an agency with a long name, it sure looks like you can cheerfully deep-six the one released last week, since it contains phrases like "World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 57 percent from 2004 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 95 percent, compared with an increase of 24 percent in the OECD countries."

What's an OECD country?* Who cares, right? But actually this report from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) is kind of a big deal, because of what it says about the collision course between business as usual and our climate and peak oil realities. The report makes a lot of assumptions, among them continued rising energy demand for the next two decades, mainly from the Third World (and especially China). It says that those cries of "Oil! Oil!" will push prices to $186 a barrel. What's more, coal will stay on the front burner as our largest source of electricity.

This is plainly impossible, both from the planet's point of view and the cold facts about our energy economy.

Coal is the biggest global warming aggravator, and climate visionaries such as NASA's James Hansen, not to mention myriad and increasingly vocal college students, are calling for "No New Coal." Soaring oil prices have already put a big crimp in demand, and it's far from clear we would even have it to pump if EIA's projections bear out.

The federal government needs to do energy outlooks, but this one is likely to be far off the mark. For instance, on June 19 China (the second-largest oil consumer today) announced steep 17 percent hikes in gasoline and diesel prices "to rein in energy consumption," according to Bloomberg.com. Electricity is going up, too, which should at least dent coal use.

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Stranded in the Minneapolis airport as hailstones the size of quarters pounded the tarmac, I turned to the local Star Tribune. Responding to an article entitled "Is This the End of the SUV?" a letter writer noted that 76 percent of Americans still drive to work alone, mostly in huge, off-road vehicles.

It's the way of things, the writer added: "When supply and demand go through their natural fall and gas seems cheap again, people will buy big cars."

Today's oil troubles are unlikely to fade away like the 1970s Arab oil embargo.

The letter writer has history on his side, but I think he -- and the many Americans who agree with him -- are wrong this time. The Arab oil embargo and the gas lines it engendered did indeed give small cars a great ride for a few years in the 1970s. (At the height of the crisis, by the way, gas was selling for $1.20 a gallon, and oil was $11 a barrel.) When that artificial shortage ended, the big cars were soon back in the showrooms, followed soon after by the first popular SUVs.

But that's unlikely to happen again. The fundamentals are entirely different now. Americans are finally driving less. Demand will likely drop in 2008, a milestone we haven't seen in 17 years. At the same time, more than half the new car registrations are for passenger vehicles, not trucks. The death of the SUV is upon us.

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I've just been on the highway to the future, and it felt great! This very green roadway was inside a big blue trailer-tractor parked by Toyota on the New Haven, Connecticut green during its big International Arts & Ideas festival.

Toyota on the green in New Haven, CT. Is its stellar reputation in trouble?

I shuffled in and was given a free packet of organic basil seeds. A bar code on the packet could be scanned to accumulate "highway miles." I correctly guessed that 2007 was the 10th birthday of the Prius, and that Toyota builds cars in Georgetown, Kentucky.

The touchscreen graphics were really cool and the message was green to a fault. The trailer was packed with a couple of dozen players, all racking up their miles. I earned 550 and won the right to plant a tree, which I chose to locate in Indiana.

One wants to believe in Toyota. Since '97 it has sold a million hybrids around the world. It was right about the Prius, which accounts for a whopping 72 percent of all hybrid sales. What people wanted was a unique, high-mileage hybrid vehicle that made a statement about their green commitment. To date, only Toyota has delivered that.

Toyota has also purchased 100 percent green power, planted trees, has "living in harmony with the Earth" as one of its guiding principles, and on and on.

So it was kind of disturbing to see the company linked to human trafficking and sweatshop abuses. According to a 65-page report made public by the National Labor Committee June 18, Priuses are "made by low-wage temps." The report says that a third of the company's assembly-line workers in Japan are temporary, "have few rights and earn less than 60 percent of what full-time workers do."

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The day oil hit $138 a barrel, I was in ultra-rich Greenwich, Connecticut looking at 16-cylinder cars and thinking about how history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. It was the 13th annual Greenwich Concours d'Elegance, presenting an overpowering collection of Packards, Duesenbergs and Pierce Arrows.

Show judging at the Greenwich Concours.

Why don't we see these marques today? Because they misread the market and offered big, powerful and expensive cars during the depths of a Depression. Sound familiar? At least gas was cheap back then. Does GM have an excuse for filling its showrooms with Tahoes, Sierras and Hummers when average folk are having to choose between putting gas in the tank and food on the table?

I stood in awe before a 1937 Delahaye 135 M Roadster with an unbelievably gorgeous, over-the-top streamlined body by Figoni and Falaschi. French-made Delahayes could fetch as much as $20,000 (just for the chassis, without a body!). In the 1930s, the average American salary was $1,368. A year. Can you buy a Delahaye today? No, you cannot.

Oil prices have doubled in the last year. Automakers are frantically shutting pickup and SUV plants and making hasty plans for new subcompacts with four-cylinder engines. GM is likely to put Hummer on the block for peanuts.

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Arjun N. Murti is an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and he made headlines this week when he predicted that crude oil would soon go to $200 a barrel. You don't really have to be an expert to make that call — petroleum prices are plainly out of control, and there's little reason to expect them to return to pre-crisis levels.

High oil prices: feel the pain.

That price will mean $6 a gallon at the pumps, a level of pain that I'm sure most Americans don't want to contemplate. But contemplate it we must. As I typed this, the price was over $135 a barrel, and Democratic leaders in Congress were having a field day excoriating outrageously compensated oil executives at a hearing that turned into an inquisition. They've done that before -- it plays well back in the districts -- but vitriol alone won't make prices go down. Big Oil is cashing in, but it's riding trends set on the international spot market.

One of the most prescient observers on the subject of peak oil is the writer James Howard Kunstler, whose nonfiction book The Long Emergency envisioned a post-oil economy that disenfranchises large sections of the Southwest (we won't be able to air-condition it) and suburbia (not viable without motorized transportation).

Kunstler's latest book, World Made by Hand, is a novel that takes this idea even further. It envisions a dystopia in which transportation is difficult, food is locally grown and centralized government is slowly disappearing. It's bleak, and maybe unlikely, but definitely a possible future if we can't replace cheap oil.

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