Some people don't have any reasonable alternatives. There are no bus routes near where I live and work, none of my co-workers live close enough to car pool, and I can't afford a more efficient car.

What baffles me is how SUV sales continue to be so high.

"Fix", as in "launch a military campaing in Middle East"?

I still think there is the lesser discussed side of the story, where after mergers and acquistions, too few companies have too much control over the supply.

To Crazy Ivan's point, I think companies have generally been able to absorb the increased cost of transportation, but as we reach a point where they can't the effect on the economy whether it be a retail giant or the average consumer is going to snowball.

My mother-in-law's husband is a consultant for a large mechanical contractor that works primarily in the oil industry. I had an interesting conversation with him a few weeks ago in which he said that he expects to see supply and demand shift again over the coming years as the big "new" oil consumers like China and India get new oil production capacity up and running. Right now those countries are mostly importing, but there is a huge amount of drilling and refinery infrastructure going into place now that will eventually allow them to fill much of their demand domestically, and possibly even become exporters themselves.

Obviously that's no help to us now, or even within the next couple of years, but it will be interesting to see how things shape up.

From a good Denver post article on the rise:

The short answer is we're being screwed by the oil companies. The price of oil no longer has any bearing on the price of gas. There's no incentive for the oil companies to compete anymore. They collectively control the supply of fuel, and there's no reason for them to increase refinery capacity. That would be less profit per unit. Gas prices are only going to go up.

Okay, I'm going to be the sole ugly capitalist here and say that all this gas station bashing is pretty tiresome. It's about as juvenile as yelling at a waiter because the prices are too high.

My economist friend told me this joke that seems entirely too fitting under the circumstances.

Three gas station owners were serving out lengthy prison sentances and decided to reveal their charges to one another:

The first said that he charged one penny per gallon more than his neighbor and was sent to prison for price gouging.

The second revealed that he charged one penny per gallon less than his neighbor and was sent to prison for dumping.

The third confessed that he charged exactly to the penny what his neighbor did and was sent to prison for price fixing.

It is funny, but there is certainly no other market quite like the oil one -- any perceived problems are wholly inflated so that gas prices can also be inflated and explained away by PR more readily.

Nor does it help that we're now burning government mandated ethanol-summer blends that require refinery adjustments just to make. Thanks government! God knows what we'd do without those corn subsidies!

I personally hope gas continues to rise.

Only then will there be a market incentive to develop technologies for transportation other then the good old fashion internal combustion engine.

It will eventually get to a point where things like electric cars and the like will finally become main stream.

F*ck that, I want one of these:

If there truly was a problem on the supply side, there already would be ample incentive to increase production. With oil at $78/barrel, it instantly became attractive to start refining Canadian tar sand. The only thing that prevents a large-scale conversion to that is the "fear" that a rational president that isn't in the thrall of moronic neocons will somehow bring about the political stability that will lower global prices of crude overall.

If prices remain high due to instability, the profits from refining oil shale and tar sands become very attractive. The supply is there. There are far greater reserves of tar sands in Canada than there are rich oil fields in all of the Middle East. It's just a cost of extraction issue.

The company best positioned, of course, to profit from Canadian tar sand extraction is the world's largest oil services company. Extra points go out to the first poster who guesses which American Vice President is still getting deferred compensation from that company.

Alternatively, the fear of really expensive electricity bills outweigh the fear of nuclear power.

Absolutely! Since there is no way American Ingenuity or American Business will EVER find a more efficient means of generating electricity large-scale. Might as well resign ourselves to the system we came up with in 1882. I mean, think about it! If you DID come up with a cleaner way of generating electricity you'd still have to find a way to distribute the stuff, somehow connect all locations to some kind of grid, find a way to measure usage... clearly a problem that researchers and industry will have to work hard and long on solving! Heck, I bet there are places where you just couldn't get it. Luckily we currently use gasoline for our mass-transportation. Driving that stuff to every corner of the country just makes good business sense. Hydrogen too, heck I'm waiting for my utility company to hook up my Hydrogen valve.
I went to Europe a month ago and I was appalled at the number of solar panels I saw. Don't they know that Solar Panels generate inferior electricity? Plays havoc with the tar shingles and plywood construction as well. No, I'm glad that we are committed to generating power the American way. My household runs ONLY on coal electricity. I turn those other options away at the plug. My American appliances just don't run on anything else.
Clearly using an electric car defeats all conservation attempts because it relies on our only American way of generating electricity, burning coal.

Seriously... is that the only reason I'm not allowed to drive a full electric vehicle yet? And don't talk to me about those Hobby cars, conversion kits, and sport-rockets. I mean a simple, basic, consumer friendly, 3 prong plug electric get-to-work and maybe carry a box or two vehicle. Hell, I'll reimburse my workplace the 3-6 dollars of electricity it will take to recharge. Just think... no more unsightly oil-leaks in parking-lots. Exploding radiators and mysterious clankings in the explosion box a thing of the past.

Can anyone tell me why it wouldn't make sense to go all-electric instead of wasting time with the Hybrid BS OTHER than preserving jobs and stringing it out until the auto and oil industries figure out how to make a buck out of all this?

Battery technology is not quite there to allow complete replacement of standard cars given the current electrical system. Basically, given the capacity of current batteries and the rate at which we can recharge them, charging takes quite awhile (an hour or more) for a range of 20-80 miles. Systems that deliver electricity faster do exist to charge faster, but of course they'd have to be made widely available to allow for charging on the go. The supply for electricity is in place, but not the delivery system.

Linkage, read near the middle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_vehicle

Too many people mention alternative fuels for cars without thinking about where that fuel will come from. As for electric cars, only a fool would suggest that an increase in electricity usage wouldn't increase the amount of coal we burn. We still get almost half of our electricity from coal. Natural gas and nuclear energy are the other two big boys on the block and they both have their own issues.

How about the cost to install and maintain weather resistant outdoor outlets?

We'd still have the mysterious clankings and we'd get exploding batteries as well.

Not to mention Americans would get to taste food that's made with real sugar instead of corn syrup.

CC brings up a good point; an electric economy is essentially a nuclear economy. Some of the best reactor designs use the Helium-3 isotope. There are two big sources of He-3... the moon, and Qatar. Everybody back into the desert!

I'm sure the battery problem is just another hurdle to overcome, and an essential one. It's not sustainable to just keep throwing them out.