Facing a collapsing ideology, conservatives are now scrambling for damage control. Take the environment.

After years of denying global warming, a growing number of Republicans are now stalwart defenders of the Earth. Who could have foreseen the day when staunch Alaskan conservative Ted Stevens would push for 40 mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards?

Of course, Bush continues to drag his heels. In his State of the Union address he offers the appearance of the born-again environmentalist. Could he really be turning on his allies in Big Oil and Saudi Arabia when he calls for a reduction in oil use of 20% over the next 10 years?

As is usually the case, this is a ruse. Bush doesn't stipulate whether the reduction will come from current or projected oil use. We can assume he means projected use, in which case the "reduction" simply amounts to holding current oil use constant and filling the projected 2% growth rate for future travel demand with ethanol. Let them drive corn, says the King.

This is cover for the Oil Empire, that complex of oil companies, oil producing nations, and the auto and related industries. They can't produce the extra oil that would be necessary for the typical 2% growth rate over the next decade. In other words, with Bush's plan, oil use will continue at the current maximum rate in order to wring from the system the maximum amount of profit for his sponsors. Note that here we have a tacit acknowledgement that we are at or close to global peak oil. Or more exactly, that we are on the undulating plateau of roughly maximum oil production that characterizes the transition to terminal oil decline.

Likewise when Bush suggests doubling the size of our strategic oil reserves, one wonders about his true motives. In his view, it is clearly the time to stem the recent fall in oil prices. Expanding these reserves will create new demand and push prices up. Other countries are following suit, perhaps in one final orgy, the feast before the famine. The oil companies could hardly be happier. This is not conspiracy theory, simply payback for campaign support and ideological synergy. Of course, secondarily, the reserves will give us a couple of months' cushion should the Saudis decide that Bush is no longer batting for them, and decide to embargo the US, shades of 1973.

Meanwhile, a group of large corporations, including GE and Alcoa, are jumping on the global warming bandwagon, even asking for a carbon cap-and-trade system. This could simply be a form of green brand-marketing, or heading off more stringent regulations. But it also suggest something much deeper: a general crisis in neoliberalism, an acknowledgement that unregulated free-market capitalism cannot respond appropriately to a dying Earth.

As Al Gore has implicitly recognized, global warming is the Achilles' heel of our current economic system, a system he has described as dysfunctional. Global warming is the specter that has come to haunt the elites of the global north, the externality that cannot be exported or swept under the mat of the poor.

The self-regulating market is a fiction that cannot be sustained, to use the terminology of Karl Polanyi, writing over 60 years ago. Over the next decade, I would expect to see a resurgence of Keynesian economics, as elites are forced to recognize the bankruptcy of neoliberalism and the end of the cheap oil economy.

Internationally, I would also expect to see moves to reform the WTO/World Bank/IMF complex. From the left, such a call has been made through a mechanism that involves democritizing the world financial institutions through the United Nations. (See www.reformcampaign.net.) Of course, the "free-marketeers" and neocons will not go quietly.

Meanwhile, a time of crisis is also a time of opportunity. When the system starts to fail to respond to people's basic needs of decent jobs, affordable health care and transportation, they will be open to new ideas.

For years, many anti-globalization activists and writers such as David Korten and Julian Darley have been promoting a small-scale, market-based localism. Such an economy offers the possibility of a community ethics that would counter the greed and over-consumption that is playing havoc with the Earth's ecosystems.

Other progressive writers, such as Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, are more critical of markets in general, seeing them as primarily means to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. These writers would prefer to preserve the benefits of scale and advanced technology that comes with large corporations by "socializing" them. That is, by having them serve society at large instead of shareholders.

Other approaches are being developed to respond to peak oil more specifically. Jon Rynn, whose essays can be found at www.saundersresearch.com, writes of extending a Mondragon-type network of cooperative banks and businesses to our own country. Rynn also advocates for a green transition to wind and solar energy, compact cities, mass transit, and sustainable agriculture. Such a move also brings with it the chance to revive our manufacturing base and fend off economic recession.

Without the "vision-thing" we will muddle along, burning our corn in cars, until we have none left to eat. The longer we postpone the radical changes necessary to deal effectively with peak oil and climate change, the more drastic the future consequences for rich and poor alike.