IT'S THE DAY BEFORE THE SMU TALK—a typical rush hour in the Dallas metro zone—and most of the region's 5.7 million denizens are behind the wheel, nearly eight out of ten of them driving solo, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Dallas North Tollway is a slow-moving six-lane river that weaves through 22 miles of suburbia, from the manicured lawns of Highland Park, through the mirror-image 'burbs of Addison, Farmers Branch, and Plano, and finally into the exurban netherworld of Frisco—a 90-minute rush-hour commute that a few years ago took 35.

Today Kunstler is one of the prisoners of gridlock: Jeffrey Brown is squiring him to a few of Dallas's New Urbanism developments, the compact, stroll-friendly communities designed to combat the hydrocarb habit. The ten-mile-per-hour idling past strip malls, chain restaurants, and office parks has put Kunstler in a funk. "I get so depressed when I come to these places," he says. "I really wonder what these people are thinking."

Brown nods. "All this has to go," he says, sweeping his hands across the asphalt-and-steel horizon. "It's unsustainable. The sooner it happens, the better." Yes, despite the fact that he makes his money in oil, and despite the fact that he lives in a Dallas suburb, Brown is a Kunstlerian.

In the meantime, the problem with getting Kunstler to the New Urbanism sites is that you have to use the freeway to reach them. Brown has segued off the tollway and is now on I-75 heading toward the just-completed five-tier, $261 million highway interchange between U.S. 75 and I-635.

"This is one heroic motherfucker of an interchange," says Kunstler, in the mock Texas twang he's been using since his plane touched down a couple of hours ago.

"I thought you'd appreciate the majesty of it all," Brown says.

Brown, for his part, believes he has seen the future in the vanishing black gold of Texas, and it has scared him. Last spring he picked up a copy of Hubbert's Peak, in which Deffeyes expands on Hubbert's classic theory. This winter, Deffeyes posted a stunning update on his Web site: The planet reached peak production in December 2005, he concluded. If that view frightened Brown, The Long Emergency terrified him.

"There are two camps," Brown explains. "The peak-oil community believes there are roughly two trillion recoverable barrels of supply left." In the other camp, he adds, are major oil companies, the Saudi government, and people like oil-industry analyst Daniel Yergin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1991 book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. This crowd thinks there are about four to six trillion recoverable barrels in the ground, enough to satisfy demand for decades.

Yergin, one of Kunstler's chief opponents, predicts that we might hit global peak in 15 years. But he doesn't believe this would precipitate a remorseless decline into chaos. Instead, he says the oil supply would ebb and flow in undulating cycles while, in the backdrop, advanced new technologies would help boost production.

Figuring out who's right, unfortunately, is a near-impossible task. The Saudis don't disclose statistics about what's left of the planet's biggest oil fields, leaving peak-oil theorists like Simmons and Paul Roberts to tease out conclusions from mountains of technical papers and reports in oil-trade journals.

"We are in the minority opinion right now," says Brown, as he navigates yet another traffic clot. "But we're a growing minority." Then his countenance brightens. He's hosting a dinner for Kunstler this evening, along with faculty from SMU's environmental-science program, but beforehand he wants to show off just one last New Urbanism project, and the place is finally within reach.

He winds through the suburb of Addison, finds the site, and drives through. Kunstler peers out the window at the supposedly walkable community. "I give Dallas credit for trying," he sighs. "But just try and walk from one of these developments to another one—it would be a Bataan death march."