The oil industry prospers in cycles, and nowhere is that more obvious than here on the Central Coast. Lately, the cycle has been consistently high, resulting in record profits for some of the world's oil giants.

The huge profits, of course, come at consumers' expense. We've all felt that pinch. As gas prices rose above $3 a gallon last year, the big conglomerates raked in tens of billions of dollars, all the while complaining about how difficult it is to make a buck in the oil business.

Meanwhile, those same companies have their representatives fanning out across the planet to find the next petroleum mother lode. The extraction schemes range from the ridiculous to the just plain insulting. Think there's oil beneath the Santa Barbara Channel? Slant a drill casing several miles from shore and pull it out, a real but almost science-fiction approach to sucking more oil out of Earth.

In fact, no challenge is beyond the scope of an aggressive oil company CEO's imagination. These corporations think they can make a profit from even the most unlikely of sources.

One of those - at least in the eyes of most of the folks who live there - is Upper Lopez Canyon, a bit northeast of Arroyo Grande. Private landowners there have been in the sights of oil companies for years, despite the fact the region would be all but inaccessible for oil-drilling rigs. And then there's the problem of where to place the pipeline to get the oil out to a refinery.

Those obstacles did not prevent one Upper Lopez Canyon landowner from leasing mineral rights to an Australia-based oil company. He even cited those snags as a rationale for granting the lease - he felt it would be so difficult a deal for the oil company, they'd never drill on his land despite their payment to him.

There probably are quite a few landowners in the United States who relied on such faulty logic, then watched in dismay as the lease-owning oil company showed up and started to scrape away nature's cover and drill.

Advertisement

That fellow's neighbors are not pleased about his decision to, potentially at least, open the canyon door to the oil industry. They see - and smell - what happened in Price Canyon, with its drilling rigs and churning pumps.

But the neighborhood dispute in Upper Lopez really is just a snippet of a much greater debate, one that citizens and government officials should be having in every region where petroleum deposits sit, far beneath the surface.

The central question comes down to this: Should we extract more oil to meet an ever-growing demand, or should we begin getting serious about finding viable alternatives to petroleum-based fuels?

The answer should be obvious to everyone. Oil industry supporters will argue that we can never eliminate oil, because so much of our daily lives and economy depend on it. But common sense dictates that we are dealing with a finite resource - petroleum - and someday we're simply going to run out. Shouldn't we do a better job of preparing for a future without oil?

As it now stands, we, as a society, aren't even making a halfhearted effort to work toward an oil-less future. We still drive behemoth vehicles that suck up gasoline at an incredible rate, and we still behave as though oil is cheap and we can use it any way we want.

We're just fooling ourselves about that. The world's petroleum supply has a sunset clause, and it could be invoked far sooner than most people realize.

This may not resolve the dispute about drilling for oil in Upper Lopez Canyon, but we hope it starts a dialog about dealing with the larger issue.

September 12, 2007