I know for me, I drive little, and most of my driving is for leisure, so the price of gas matters less to me – I just do my hiking & birdwatching closer to home, or suck it up.

It’s a bummer for those who bought into the suburban “dream” of a 2500 sq ft home and a 50 mile commute, but IMO that’s not a sustainable community arrangement.

For Australia, this wouldn’t be too hard, since the data is fairly well available (leases come with strict reporting requirements). Not sure about the rest of the world.

Although environmentalists may increase prices by restricting supply, they also reduce demand, which lowers prices. So every time you see somebody riding a bike to work, that person is making your gasoline cheaper.

“It’s so called Environmentalist who have put us in this position of rising energy costs.”

I completely disagree. In fact, the whole point of this post was that placing blame entirely on one “side” does nothing. But, I guess you missed that.

First of all, the article you link to claims we are going into a global cooling period (by linking to a blog post that cites Monckton, nice try). Right off the bat, this whole viewpoint is suspect. Secondly, and more importantly, that jaajoe.com article strikes a very bizarre anti-energy conservation tone. What is up with that? What happened to ‘a penny saved is a penny earned’? So, demand should increase infinitely only to be matched by increased supply, no matter what the consequences?

I agree that we use waaaay too much oil here in America. Just a few interesting things that I’ve picked up from somewhere (I don’t have the sources for these):

The largest consumer of Diesel is the US Armed Forces. They have to power all their equipment and ships somehow, right?

We could cut out consuming tens of millions of barrels of oil every year if we quit producing plastic bags (the kind for WalMart, etc).

I have friends in England who are utterly – and correctly – astonished by how much we drive in America, and how little we use public transportation. The state of our public transportation might have something to do with it, but that definitely doesn’t excuse us.

I was bitterly disappointed to find out that Toyota once made an entirely electric RAV4, but discontinued it because of “lack of interest”. Hey! I’m interested.

Unfortunately, I’m also not in any position financially to avail myself of cleaner technology on that scale. I especially won’t be once I start grad school. CF bulbs I can do, but not cars. I’ll bike as often as I can, but something tells me that’s not going to work too well in a Buffalo winter.