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Gas prices may have plummeted recently, but the pump will soon be pumping your wallet again.
America, as it always will be, is locked up in the death struggle of needing to supply energy to its massive infrastructure. This generation, possibly beginning with the election of Barack Obama, will be defined by how it transitions from a world where energy is extremely cheap and available to a world where energy is a bit more difficult to obtain and more valuable.
At the pace of consumption it is currently on, 82.59 billion barrels per day according to the CIA World Factbook, the world will feel a pretty sick slap on the face when it realizes that oil is not unlimited and prices start to reflect the scarcity. The world will never run out of oil altogether, because extraction methods will improve and consumption will go down as the true value of the energy in oil is reassessed compared to how much oil is available, but it will surely need a diet that isn't so heavy in it.
When one examines how America is currently structured, as a system of cities and suburbs, things are simply spread too far apart for them to remain practical. According to the United States Census Bureau, nine out of ten people drive to work, and 77 percent of those people drive alone. Instead of the current frame of mind, where driving to work is something of a negligible expense of doing business, in the future this energy expenditure will be far more important.
Not only are the suburbs not located ideally for a more energy-conscious future, their existence as a symbol of the American Dream is dying as well. Sales and prices in the housing market continue to decline, and the house with the picket fence is beginning to look like something to avoid instead of something to aspire to.
As there always is with change, people will be afraid of transitioning away from oil. Luckily, running out of oil will never be a crisis where the global structure and economy are truly in peril, but it will be a slow, thorough force for change in business and culture. For anything or anyone to survive it must adapt to changing circumstances, and it looks like our circumstances are going to change quite a bit.
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