Residents bracing for an oil crisis

Residents bracing for an oil crisis:
by Martha Elson -- Louisville Coourier-Journal -- 10-20-05
"Robert Hirsch, an oil consultant and engineer who has worked at the Department of Energy and Arco Oil and was the lead author of the report, said that cutting back on driving to the grocery store and other conservation measures are good for the environment, but they won't make any real difference in the oil supply.
'We're talking about a problem that is so much bigger than any of us,' he said from his home in Alexandria, Va.
'Because our whole system operates on oil, it's like blood in your body. If you drain a significant amount of blood out of your body, you're not going to perform very well in a whole lot of ways. If you keep draining it out, the situation gets worse and worse.'
Hirsch said the only hope for avoiding economic upheaval would be to quickly start building facilities on a massive scale to produce alternative fuels for vehicles, or 'trash half the vehicles out there.' "