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Riding to work on the bypass, I pulled my motorcycle to the shoulder to allow a wailing ambulance to pass. Beside me on an embankment were perhaps six or eight workers wielding gas-powered grass trimmers. As I resumed my journey, my mind wandered to the question, “Who will get the gas?”

For the past several years I have been presenting a lecture to local audiences called “Coming Soon, How Peak Oil Will Change Your World Forever.” Being merely a concerned citizen and not an expert, my early presentations were gut-wrenching affairs, and I sensed my audiences’ perception that I was exaggerating the urgency. With the price of a barrel of oil having risen from $35 to $137 a barrel in five years, I seem to have become commensurately less of a lunatic.

It is hard to overstate how tightly tied our way of life has become to abundant and affordable oil. Consumers are grumbling mightily about the high price of fuel and have changed their habits in modest ways, but the real changes will come when we go to buy gas and there’s none to buy.

Who will get the gas?

Food production is intensively energy dependent. Cheap energy has radically transformed agriculture and allowed monocultural mega-farms to dominate the marketplace. Seven to 10 calories of petroleum energy are necessary to produce one calorie of food energy. The typical meal travels 1,200 to 1,400 miles to our plates. Surely the cultivating, harvesting, distributing, warehousing and retailing of food must get the gas.

I heard a politician say recently that government needs to help people afford the fuel that takes them to and from work. But cheap oil previously allowed them to move unheard-of distances away from their jobs. Should our society subsidize a worker who made a conscious decision to live 40 miles from his job? Will commuters get the gas?

Our secondary school systems have seen an unprecedented era of consolidations in recent years as neighborhood middle and high schools have merged into centralized facilities. This scheme, too, is a product of cheap petroleum. School systems are reeling under the strain of rising fuel prices and associated costs in keeping their bus fleets moving down the road. Certainly, our school kids must get the gas.

Our U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest consumer of oil. Our troops in the Middle East use 3.5 million gallons of oil per day there alone. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful flight of a military aircraft since the birth of aviation that didn’t leave the runway fueled by anything other than a petroleum derivative. I’m no expert on this stuff, but my guess is that other than some nuclear-powered ships and submarines, every land, sea and air machine in the military is powered by petroleum. If our defense department is entrusted with preserving our sovereignty, surely it must get the gas.

Our increasingly centralized health care systems have also re-engineered themselves around abundant and affordable petroleum. As we wallow in the philosophical conundrum of whether health care is a fundamental right or a market commodity, our health care systems are incessantly gobbling energy. Will sick and injured people get the gas?

The manufacturing of virtually all consumer items is now done overseas, where a combination of cheap foreign labor and cheap transport costs have eviscerated local industries. Wal-Mart has become a dominant retailer because it established a pipeline of products across distant oceans and into its local megastores. Scarce and expensive petroleum will doom the system. Will retailers get the gas?

Then there’s recreation, from NASCAR to collegiate football to bass fishing to soccer games. My teen daughter will burn 1 12 gallons today driving to the stable to ride her horse. When we wish to recreate, will we get the gas?

Upcoming shortages at the pump will test the mettle of citizens and politicians alike as we wrestle with who gets the gas. Free-market economists waggishly proclaim that the market will decide. Will the free market decide whether your child’s bus has gasoline to carry him or her to school? Will the free market decide whether a hospital can send an ambulance to pick up Grandma when she has a seizure? Will the free market decide whether Earnhardt, Kahne and Gordon have fuel for 500 laps of a racetrack? Will the free market allow the garbage truck to collect your garbage and deliver it to the landfill? When there’s not enough to go around, and never will be again, how will we decide who will get the gas?

Michael Abraham grew up in Christiansburg and lives in Blacksburg. He keeps doing the things his mother warned him against.