That’s for self-serve regular at the corner station.

It’s not just that greedy pig oil companies are exploiting this for their own gain and screw everyone else, it’s also that supplies of cheap oil are running out at precisely the same time that demand is soaring.

The Peak Oil hypothesis says oil production follows the familiar bell curve, and that we are about to start down the steep slope of declining production. As oil gets more expensive to get out of the ground, we will soon look back wistfully at $3 a gallon gas.

TheOilDrum has more on this, it’s a blog by oil patch insiders, people who know the business. Clusterfuck Nation, by James Howard Kunstler, is near-apocalyptic about Peak Oil.

America commuted back into the unknown country of $3-plus gasoline and $75-plus oil (per barrel) last week, and President Bush revisted the Tomorrowland of hydrogen cars in the absence of any reality-based response to the global energy crunch that will change all the terms of America’s “non-negotiable way of life.”

But the problem is not going away. It’s not five or ten years down the road — it’s here, now. We’re in the zone. We’re entering a world of hurt. The pain will ebb and flow, as the pain of a fatal illness ebbs and flows over the days. The price of oil and gasoline will ratchet up and down, but along a discernable upward trendline.

What will we do when cheap oil starts to vanish? Seriously. That’s what Kunstler is talking about, and he hammers home that no one in either party is doing anything about it.

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