■"Russia Is Flushófor Now: Oil Revenue Bolsters Finances, but Restructuring Is Neglected," by Guy Chazan, Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2004, p. A14.

■"An Oil Binge in Latin America: Revenue Windfall Relieves Pressure for Structural Economic Change," by John Lyons, Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2004, p. A22.

■"Oil Buys Time for Saudis: Prosperity, While It Lasts, Blunts Demands for Faster Change," by Hugh Pope, Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2004, p. A20.

■"Panel Pegs Illicit Iraq Earnings at $21.3 Billion," by Judith Miller, New York Times, 16 November 2004, p. A11.

■"Looming Oversupply of Crude Oil Could Mean a Decline in Prices," by Karen Matusic, Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2004, p. B3C.

■"Global Surge in Use of Coal Alters Energy Equation: Shift Offers a Way to Slow Rise in Demand for Oil; Worries on Global Warming," by Patrick Barta and Rebecca Smith, Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2004, p. A1.

The oil boom affects politics all over the dial. Structural reforms that should be happening in Latin America and Russia are being put off. Political reforms that should be moving ahead in Saudi Arabia are likewise being fudged (why do anything difficult today that you can put off until tomorrow?).

It's this sort of fundamental reality that always makes me bemused whenever I'm confronted with "alternative global futures" that speak to either everything working out or everything going to hell in a handbasket. The reality is that one country/region's bad news is another country/region's good news.

Being a rainy-day type myself, you'd like to think that country's would take advantage of windfalls to do the heavy economic and political lifting when it comes to reforms, but that's not how the world works. Regimes experiment with their legitimacy only when they're really scared about the pathway they're apparently on. Otherwise it's muddle though and let the next guy deal with it.

So Ecuador bribes retirees with extra payments now when it should be revamping its pension system. Russia, at least, is credited with stashing away some of its windfall and paying down its external debt, to the delight of the IMF. By while Putin's balancing the books nicely, he's not pushing ahead on structural reforms in the banking sector, liberalizing the energy sector (where monopolies persist) or cutting back on state meddling in the private sector. In Saudi Arabia, having all that extra dough means the House of Saud's absolute rule tends to escape the kind of public scrutiny that it suffered during the budgetary cutbacks of the last decade, when oil prices were low. This time around, though, thanks to the creeping impact of the info revolution in the kingdom, more of the ordinary citizens are a whole lot less ignorant of what goes on inside the royal family. As one industrialist says, "Popular economic expectations are extremely high. If [the boom] stumbles, there will be social unrest, protests."

Of course, you don't need a oil boom to reap all sorts of windfalls from oil. Look at how well Saddam did under all those years of the UN's oil-for-food program, which constitutedówe now guessóa nifty transfer of $21B to the dictator's coffers.

But even this oil boom is showing signs of aging. Inventories held by downstream companies (refining and distribution, as opposed to upstream exploration and production) in the U.S. and elsewhere are swelling, meaning we're looking at an oversupply of crude in response to market prices rising (damn those markets!).

So the clock is already ticking, and a good thing too. All this high-priced oil is pushing countries like India and China to substitute as much as possible with coal, and you know what that gets you: much higher CO2 emissions from those non-signatories to the Kyoto Protocol.

Ah yes, what goes around comes aroundóthanks to global wind patterns. . .