By Aaron Naparstek

THE ELECTION-YEAR mudslinging over gas prices officially began on March 29, when Dick Cheney accused John Kerry of flip-flopping on his support for increased gas taxes. "After voting three times to increase the gas tax and once proposing to increase it by 50 cents a gallon," Cheney charged, "he now says he doesn't support it."

With gas prices rising to record levels, Kerry was only too happy the vice president brought up the topic. That evening, Kerry told the crowd at a San Francisco fundraiser that if the cost of a gallon kept creeping toward $3, "Dick Cheney and President Bush are going to have to carpool to work together. Those aren't Exxon prices, ladies and gentleman, those are Halliburton prices!" That zinger elicited a huge roar and zipped around the world as the sound bite du jour. It was such a hit, Kerry added it to his stump speech.

The Bush campaign struck back with a new television ad, entitled "Wacky." "Some people have wacky ideas," says a mildly sarcastic male voice. "Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry." A vaudevillian image of 12 guys in business suits riding a gigantic, clownish bicycle jitterbugs across the screen.

You can't squeeze a whole lot of policy detail into a 30-second ad or an evening-news sound bite. But after sifting through the rhetorical chaff on gas prices, the parameters of the current national debate on energy policy become clear.

For the Bush campaign, gas taxes are out of the question. There will be no discussion of, say, the wide-ranging benefits that Europeans have derived from their $5 per gallon, or the fact that we pay a gas tax to the Saudis rather than our own public coffers. Gas taxes are simply "wacky." You'd have to be even more "wacky" to talk about people driving less.

The message coming from the Democrats is equally demagogic. Though the Kerry campaign has issued policy papers focused on reducing American dependence on foreign oil (buried deep within the Kerry web site), in public he has tended to steer clear of discussing these ideas. Rather, he uses his airtime to criticize the president.

While crowds love Kerry's line about Bush and Cheney riding to work together, there is something disappointing about the Democratic nominee ridiculing the idea of carpooling. In addition to reducing traffic, car-sharing happens to be one of the fastest, cheapest, most high-impact ways that Americans can make real reductions in daily oil consumption. Car-sharing should be part of the Democratic platform, not a laugh line.

Kerry and the Democrats' other gasoline talking points are equally ill-advised. Telling the president to do a better job of "jaw-boning" the Saudis does not address the need to make America less beholden to foreign energy suppliers. Nor does the call to release oil from the Strategic Reserve.

The strategy for both campaigns so far has been pretty simple: Gas prices are rising rapidly. Blame it on the other guy. Present yourself as the guy who will make gas cheaper.

In the age of the 30-second campaign ad, we've come to expect this sort of approach to complex issues. It's the norm. But America is on the cusp of an energy crisis that is going to redefine the way we live—whether our leaders prepare us for it or not.

IN 1956, a Shell Oil geologist named M. King Hubbert stood up before a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute and, much to the chagrin of his bosses, predicted that oil production in the continental United States would peak and begin to decline starting in the early 1970s.

According to his colleague and author of the book, Hubbert's Peak, Ken Deffeyes, "Almost everyone inside and outside the oil industry rejected Hubbert's analysis." They simply didn't want to hear it. The 1960s was the greatest decade of global oil discovery ever. Vast new reserves were found all over the world. Soon all but a faithful few simply forgot about Hubbert's forecast.

Hubbert arrived at his prediction through an analysis of oil-field discoveries. By 1956, after drilling tens of thousands of holes across the continental United States, some oilmen had a pretty solid idea of what was in the ground. The discovery of new reserves in the lower 48 had peaked in the 1930s and had been in decline ever since. Hubbert noted that, when plotted over time, the rate of discovery formed a nearly perfect bell-curve. He theorized that the annual rate of oil production would form a similar bell curve, more than a few decades later. The highest point of this second curve would be the year that the U.S. produced more oil than it ever had before and ever would again. That would be the "oil peak."