The automobile matured as a means of transportation just over a century ago, after a Vermonter bet he could drive one of the contraptions across the country. Now the bets are on how much longer they'll be on the roads.

In 1905, the automobile was considered a fad and a rich-person's toy. Horatio Nelson Jackson, on a visit to San Francisco from his home in Vermont, decided to show that the automobile could make the same transcontinental trip that the train could, and he bet $50 that he could drive a car to New York City.

Jackson won his wager, after nearly two months of adventuresome travel in a 20-horsepower Winton touring car which he dubbed the Vermont. Horse-mounted cowboys towed his car out of sand drifts, bicyclists provided him with maps, and he himself bicycled in search of fuel when the Vermont ran out of gas. When spare tires were not to be had, he continued by winding rope around the wheels. Horatio Nelson Jackson and the Vermont arrived in New York City on July 26, 1903, having burned 800 gallons of gasoline. Jackson was $50 richer from his bet; I don't know how much poorer he was from the gasoline and all the wear and tear on the car.

Since 1903 was also the year the Wright brothers used petroleum to fuel the first airplane flight, you could call it the year the age of petroleum dawned.

Since at least 1980, variations on a different type of wager have been placed: When and how fast the age of petroleum-fueled abundance will come to an end.

The best known is the wager between resource economist Julian Simon and environmental researcher Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Simon, who believes that rising human population actually increases the availability of natural resources, wagered that metals would continue becoming less expensive, in real terms. He challenged Ehrlich to pick any five metals and any period of time over which to measure their cost. In 1980, Ehrlich picked five metals and bet that they would all become more expensive by 1990.

It was an unfortunate ten-year period for Ehrlich to pick. Mining and refining metals takes a lot of fossil fuel, and oil in 1980 was at a record high. The prices of both oil and metals dropped during the 1980s, and by 1990, all five metals were less expensive in constant dollars than they had been ten years before. Julian Simon won his bet, and he proclaimed that his theories of ever-increasing abundance were vindicated.

Afterwards, Ehrlich proposed another bet, that fifteen global trends would continue to worsen over the following 10 years. The trends included less rice and wheat grown per person, less firewood available per person in developing countries, a smaller fish harvest per person from the oceans, and that men's sperm cell counts would keep declining. Simon declined to take the bet.

Metals prices are skyrocketing again, as oil prices in inflation-adjusted dollars have surged past the record set in 1980. Since 1990, four of the five metals in the Ehrlich-Simon wager are up in price, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars. Interestingly enough, though, chromium, tin, and tungsten still cost less in real dollars than they did in 1980, at the beginning of the Ehrlich-Simon wager. Copper, on the other hand, sells for 50% more than its 1980 price, and nickel is up 75%.

(Coincidentally, I found after drafting this post that Andrew Torrance had published a similar calculation about a month ago. He has different results than I do. I've emailed him my calculations and sources and asked him to share his, but have not heard back.)

Other, more recent bets are more directly about oil. In February, people with the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) challenged the peak oil skeptics at Cambridge Energy Resource Associates, a petroleum consulting firm known by its acronym CERA. CERA predicts that world oil production will rise by 23% in ten years. ASPO took out a letter of credit to bet CERA $100,000 that that won't happen. CERA has declined to take the bet, or even to respond to it.

Since then, according to ASPO's Steve Andrews, CERA has lowered their projected increase in world oil production somewhat. "We'll bet them on that, too," Andrews told me.

An actual bet occurred in 2005, when oil investment banker Matthew Simmons declared the end of the age of cheap oil. New York Times columnist John Tierney offered to bet Simmons $5,000 that the price of oil would stay under $100/barrel through 2010. Of course, the price hit $100/barrel in January of this year, less than two and a half years into the bet period. But Simmons thought, accurately enough, that betting on $100/barrel would be too easy, so he set the bar at $200/barrel, adjusted for inflation, in 2010. It's too early to know who will win this bet (though Stuart Staniford has constructed some intriguing projections), but the trend toward $200 oil is clear. Oil has gone from just over $10/barrel to as much as $110/barrel in the past decade.

The best bets right now, I think, are finding ways to wean oneself off of oil and other fossil fuels: insulate the house, install solar hot water and electric systems, install a wood stove or pellet stove, and make more trips by bicycle or train and fewer trips by car. Investing in those ways to reduce oil demand will surely be profitable no matter what the vagaries of future oil prices are. And when shortages arise here, you won't be hit as hard.