Energy cost and availability are a real issue, it's just that if you look backwards, there isn't much of story about where we are right now.

(I would take this a step further and say that $4 is still cheap for gasoline; it isn't clear that the much higher fuel prices in Europe have been bad economically. And I'm someone who got to start driving in the '90s when prices fell below a dollar)

Concentrating blindly on the gasoline price is misleading. Consider our environment: We largely wear products made directly or indirectly out of fossil fuels. We eat food grown using synthetic fertilizers made out of natural gas. That's also where the plastic in the keyboard you're typing on came from. Not to mention the rest of your computer which probably took at least a barrel of oil to produce from mining the ores to the finished product.

We live in compounds built out of materials that at least in some phase of their production include major oil or gas inputs. We drive and walk on roads literally made out of oil, in vehicles that were built out of parts which required major amounts of oil.

We live in an era of oil, our life is based on oil.

For now.

I'm not denying peak oil, I'm arguing that oil prices (and other energy prices) have not gone up so much in recent decades that they have smashed the economy. They must impact the economy, but I sure would point to things like increased size of the domestic labor force, the skill hoisting of the global labor force and automation before I would point to energy prices. And then things like expectations of skilled labor in the U.S. have changed substantially.

I guess we'll see soon enough. I think oil price is the real reason behind the economic trouble.

I think we're in for several more 2008-style stair step economic crashes over a longer period of time, with little growth between them. At least until we can truly replace oil as a transportable high density energy source. (Or until political and societal systems break down.)

Hopefully we get some major new energy source, like cheap fusion or space based generation, like orbital mass production of photovoltaics panels and beaming it back to earth in microwaves. Given sufficient energy, we could just synthesize the liquid fuels we need.

There's unfortunately a low chance we get this magic energy source in time, but let's hope for the best.

I have gone back and checked your links in your second reply. The second one indicates we are now spending between 4% and 6% of total household income on gasoline, which is double or triple what it was in 1979 at 2% of total household income. That's one helluva a jump.

And the residential energy link you gave: This is the headline: "Lower residential energy use reduces home energy expenditures as share of household income". So people are apparently reducing their use of energy, probably in part because they are feeling pinched.

At this point, it looks to me like you and I do not see the same conclusions from the same data. I don't understand how you can submit the links you did in support of your point of view here.

So I think it's probably best to walk away from this discussion.

Thank you.

You are reading the graph incorrectly. The values for percent of mean income are in the line graph and shown on the right axes. So in 1979, 5%, 2012, 4%.

It's not a very good measure, it isn't worth analyzing it deeply, but (to me anyway), it doesn't point to a massive increase in energy spending.