Chevron has unveiled a revolutionary new way of findingoil. It doesn't involve satellite telemetry or seismic imaging or someother high-tech means of exploration. It involves advertising.

Chevronhas a new ad campaign to get its customers to use not more oil, butless. In Chevron's words, "Energy Saved Is Energy Found." The new adsfeature people promising to carpool, to use fluorescent bulbs, even to"take my golf clubs out of the trunk."

We've heard these energy-saving tips countless times (except perhapsthe one about the golf clubs). What's new is the spectacle of a majorcorporation urging people to cut back on its core product, as part of"one of the most important efforts of our time — using less."

This is a far cry from Chevron's history and from its technologicalexpertise. Half a century ago, Chevron's predecessor helped discoverthe world's largest oil field. Two years ago, Chevron drilled arecord-setting well more than five miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico.These were oil finds in the real sense.

Duped?

But what Chevron now calls "found energy" is as far removed fromdiscovering oil as a dieting book is from producing food. Chevron seemsto have become more apologetic about oil than drug pushers are aboutdrugs. Has it been taken in by the notion of our alleged "addiction tooil"?

It's true that many politicians nowadays use that idiotic metaphorincessantly. But if those politicians were serious about breaking this"addiction," they wouldn't have been climbing the walls last summerlooking for ways to bring gas prices down.

Chevron should know better, yet its Web site offers aneasy-to-e-mail cartoon showing an "Oil Addiction Treatment Center" withbikes parked outside. Chevron's accompanying advice: "The averageAmerican uses 25 barrels of oil every year. So how about cutting backon that habit?"

It's one thing for government to urge us to conserve in a crisis.During World War II, for example, government posters reminded us that"waste helps the enemy," and that "when you ride ALONE you ride withHitler." But wartime is, thankfully, the exception, not the norm.

Or at least it used to be. But the global-warming alarmist campaignthat triggered Chevron's ads is on the verge of becoming a war of itsown, to be waged 24/7. This war will almost certainly go into high gearunder President Obama, with his promise of an 80% reduction in carbondioxide emissions by 2050.

If carbon dioxide is the enemy, then we are all enemy agents,complicit from the first cry we let out at birth. And if Chevron's"Energy Saved Is Energy Found" slogan smacks of doublespeak, it may bebecause the global warming campaign itself is so similar to theperpetual war in George Orwell's "1984."

The dispatches in this war come not from far-off battlefields, butfrom vague climate fronts. We're besieged with news stories about suchitems as Mt. Kilimanjaro's vanishing snows (though a British courtfound their disappearance unrelated to warming) and Al Gore'sPowerPoints on the alarming correlation between increased CO2 andhigher temperatures (even as it turns out that the temperature spikescame before those of CO2, belying the latter's causal role).

And just where is the warming? Despite increasing CO2 levels, globaltemperatures have been level, if not declining, for the last decade.When the warming doesn't occur as predicted, there are other Orwelliantricks — alter the rhetoric to "climate change," or devise an excusefor why the warming won't arrive for another decade.

(A study in last May's issue of Nature, for example, blamed oscillating ocean currents for the delay.)

No Babies

As in Orwell's novel, the war against carbon dioxide is unwinnable.Yes, we might reduce CO2 emissions by following Chevron's suggestions.But those reductions will be far outweighed by the fact that we'll havekids, and those kids will grow up and start their own families withtheir own houses and cars and appliances.

One of Chevron's new ads shows a somber gentleman promising to "useless energy." If Chevron is really serious about reducing our carbonfootprint, perhaps it should replace it with a shot of a young couplepromising not to have babies. If energy saved is energy found, thencustomers unborn mean even more energy found.

The car is one of mankind's most liberating technologies. The boomin car ownership in developing countries demonstrates that it servesnot a whim of Western culture, but a basic human need. If the industrythat powers the car starts treating it as a sin product, the concept ofprogress will soon be running on fumes.

Kazman is general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy organization in Washington, D.C.