Maybe the world needs an oil price shock

Yes, I know it would cause economic hardship. In fact, not just economic, but actual human suffering hardship, if there was a major constriction in the oil supply. I read or heard (or both) that Saudi Arabia has arrested more than a hundred suspects in a plot to bomb oil facilities.

Maybe they should get through.

Oh, I wouldn't like it. Getting to work in a week would go from $25 to around $100 or more. Globally, food prices would skyrocket. In many countries, poor people would not be able to afford food, and they would starve. The nascent global economic recovery would get snuffled in a flash, and the result would be a massive global recession, if not depression. Hundreds of thousands of workers would be let go. Travel and commerce would slow drastically. That dream vacation trip to Bali? Forgeddaboudit -- the price just climbed to levels that only the truly rich, and truly insulated, could afford.

Maybe that's the tough love the world needs to get off the addiction to cheap oil; to look toward the future and really ponder the consequences of overconsumption and overburning and grow-go-grow economies. Maybe we need to contemplate the "World Made by Hand" (video) as a realistic future -- even though it is not a future that anyone would want.

I actually doubt serious that a post-auto, post-electricity future is likely, unless there's a major conflict, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But I think a major oil price shock would be cold water on the face of the global economic powers that couldn't come to a climate agreement in Copenhagen. Maybe if they faced the likelihood of peak oil, the linkage between growth and consumption and the propping up of current economies on the dangerous liquid foundation of oil, maybe they'd realize it's in the best interests of all our children to back off, to put up the windmills and fire up the nuke plants and grow the switchgrass and the algae and set up the solar farms in the Sahara -- before it's really too late.

We need that power for desalination; look what's happening to the glaciers.