The Gas Rats
I would like to make a case. It concerns those price per gallon signs you see on every other street corner - the ones we watch count up each week. I say they should all be inverted to display gallons per dollar, and here's why.
Imagine it's Saturday, the day that your weekly gasoline ration coupon arrives, and it is good for one gallon. After cursing and fuming at your gas rat, as these ration cards are known, you start to think about practical matters, like, for instance, how to get to work on Monday. You'll weigh different options: maybe get the old bike down off the rack and put air in the tires or, if you are close enough, and the weather permits, you might decide to get up early and walk. Public transit systems could be a possibility, but you'll need to check schedules and routes. Again, you'll need to get up a bit earlier. If you work far from home, and at a location not serviced by any city transit system, you might call some co-workers about pooling your rations and riding together. Telecommuting, if feasible, would be even a better choice. In the longer term, you will probably start looking for a job closer to home, or consider moving closer to work.
The point is that the reality of the situation forces you into action, and your thinking shifts focus. Before the rationing began, everyone talked about all the reasons that they couldn't get by without gasoline. When the ration cards show up, the thinking turns to how will we all cope, and what we will do right now.
Getting to work is not the only problem you have to tackle. Every aspect of our daily lives will change. We will all change the way we run those daily errands. People will carpool to the grocery and hardware stores, they will consolidate their errands to shrink the number, and bike saddlebags and baskets, backpacks and push carts will blossom all around. The things that we purchase will also change as exploding transport and delivery costs drive consumer prices skyward. The whole world will start to live smarter, but not out of any mass awakening of a social conscious, but out of necessity. It will be a cleaner world, and a healthier and better one for most of us - except maybe oil producers and their pocket politicians (the real gas rats). Don't worry too much about them though, that sort always seems to find a way to hold on to wealth and power.
No doubt, our thinking about social and political issues will shift as well. Candidates with a sound energy policy will get a lot of attention. Policies emerge to address building commuter rail systems, expanding public transit systems, and funding the development of fuel cell technology and a hydrogen infrastructure to support it. The entire world economy, production and consumer, will adjust to find new sources of energy and to maximize energy efficiency in products and property.
Of course a shift away from petroleum and hydrocarbon fuels to renewables and hydrogen, creates other problems. It will take energy - electricity - to produce hydrogen, and a new generation of renewable generating plants and nuclear plants will be essential. Nuclear is a proven technology, but has issues of its own. The high level waste and finite uranium supplies that will require we focus attention on waste repositories and recycling technology. Expanding solar, wind, hydro and geothermal will mean making a step change in production capacity for things like solar cells and wind turbines. It will take money.
Funding the changes will not be easy, but it will be necessary, so it will certainly happen. Those trillions of military dollars we currently spend to prop up a doomed oil economy should help cover the cost.
The death of the oil economy, like our own deaths, is not something we care to think a lot about, but it approaches relentlessly. That brings me to my point. Invert those gasoline price signs, and they become doomsday clocks, counting down to the inevitable. Maybe seeing them ticking ever closer to zero will spur us into action - before its too late.