Out yourselves all you like, you're not alone. The problem, IMO, isn't the gas that fuels our vehicles. I'd love to quit putting my skin in the hands of morons who don't use blinkers, care where I am on the road or about the safety of their own passengers, much less mine, but I've got to be at work in the morning and I'd rather not spend the night there. The scary answers to the scary questions center on what'll happen when the price of oil trickles down to the oil-dependant industries. Oil is used to make everything you wear, everything you use and to ship everything not made of nylon, rayon, plastic or other synthetic, oil-derivitave petrochemicals, and everything that is, and it unfortunately affects every other aspect of our economy. As the demand for oil continues to skyrocket, as the IMF predicted last week, due to emerging economies in the far east, expect huge jumps in prices in everything from clothing to plastic utensils, anything shipped overland, by air or by sea, anything with plastic packaging or anything manufactured using oil as an energy source. Expect whole industries to collapse under the increasing cost of manufacturing, packaging and shipping. Quit looking for fresh fruit in the grocery store -- they won't be able to afford to ship it to your neighborhood. Forget vacation: You can't afford to fly anymore, and without easy transportation the out-of-the-way places you'd want to go will be just that, too out of the way to get to and starved of operating capital if you can. If that doesn't depress you, figger too that expanding alternative energy production infrastructure at some point, experts say, ends up costing more energy that it makes due to rising costs in, you guessed it, the oil industry. Takes a lot of oil to manufacture those high-tech windmills and neato hydrogen units, not to mention the construction cost to build a facility using existing, oil-based methods. Seems like no matter what we do or how far we come we're still vindicated in wondering when the day will come we'll have to get up off our porch like Max and go grab the leathers out of the chest in the bedroom. Whoops, I forgot, Max isn't mad anymore, he found another passion...
Selah