It's not like we should be surprised by high oil prices. We've always known that demand would outstrip production at some point (i.e. oil is not an infinitely renewable resource), and we've known that OPEC has the rest of the world by the short hairs since the embargo of 1973.
So what did we do about it then? We talked and talked about how to fix the problem and when the price of oil plummeted in the 80's, we ignored all of the proposed solutions, stuck our collective heads back up our collective a**es and pretended everything was fine.
And if oil prices crash again, we will again most likely go back to driving monster cars and pissing away the world's fossil fuels. And one of these days, when demand has outgrown the global geological limit of production capacity, the price spike in oil isn't going to come back down, and oil will keep climbing.
If we haven't got our act together by then, the high costs of petrochemical fertilizers and food transportation will drive global food prices to outrageous levels, and we can all watch in horror as over half the world's population dies of famine and the rest suffer through global wars over resources.
So, do we do we do what is necessary to transition the global economy, or do we continue to fiddle while Rome burns?
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