How many times does this have to happen before you guys finally wise up? Depending on oil to keep your economy going is a mistake. It is a scarce resource controlled by hostile countries and greedy companies. I'm not saying, "don't use any petroleum" but just don't let it become the thing you can't do without. The fact is, we burn 7 million barrels of gasoline per day essentially for personal transportation (aka automobiles & light trucks) that be substantially if not entirely replaced by cost-effective electric vehicles.
For example, using the four-year performance of my solar array here in the Northeast an acre of solar panel would produce the equivalent (assuming 25% thermal efficiency of the average current design gasoline engine) of 84,000 gals of gasoline per year, and cost about $1.4 million installed. 84,000 gallons of gasoline at $4 per gallon is $336,000 per acre giving a payback of 4.16 years. What other industrial activity can you invest in with a 4-year payback. And after the installation, there's almost no labor cost. One employee can manage acres of panels, acres!
Couple that with wind power to balance the supply and you can have a pretty reliable system. And if you use interruptible service contracts like all the natural gas companies use here in the Northeast for those occasional periods of low production can easily be managed. For example, here in the northeast, if we have a period of extreme cold and demand for natural gas for heat exceeds supply, the big factories just throttle back their gas use for few days. Nobody even thinks twice about it.
Supply management is a lot more preferable than going to war over oil, for sure.
