IT’S ON US hard and fast, and it’s real. It’s been coming for 35 years, just as those bedraggled environmentalists said, but we chose to ignore it and party on. What do we do now?

In the short term, say next winter and maybe many winters beyond, we’re basically on our own. What we can’t do is depend on governments for much. The structural adjustments, the tax changes, the psychological preparations that began a couple of decades ago in Europe have not been made in North America. Hopefully they’ll come, but it’s late, and governments are mostly confused and scrambling and into patchwork and emergency relief.

Worse, at the national level they’re still essentially in denial, as are large parts of the societies they represent. In the U.S. Congress, there are no less than 40 initiatives inquiring into the reasons for high oil prices, as though secret conspiracies can be rooted out and prices made to drop.

Whatever conspiracies exist are minuscule and will cause no drop. The ultimate oil authority, the International Energy Agency, confirmed the obvious this week: Demand is outstripping supply, or close to it. The longer heads in the oil business have been saying for years that when this was even perceived to happen, speculation would kick in on the anticipation of rising prices and shoot them up even more. That’s where we’re at now. And the cheap, conventional reserves are declining. There’s no turning back.