A brave new world ...

... where energy is plentiful but no one uses it.

Driving continues to decline as gas prices drop - Yahoo! News

It appears to me that Americans have felt the sting of energy shortages and are actually doing something about it. $4/gal gas has finally burned enough wallets that people are conserving. Luckily, even with the glut of energy we now have with the drop in the economy, people are still conserving energy.

Hopefully this trend will continue. We can avoid an energy crisis while advancing alternative fuel technology, avoiding the political quagmire that was offshore drilling.

We'll have to see what happens when the economy comes back up.

On the other side of the world, I can see all these oil countries panicking right now. Consider Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Their entire economies are based solely on oil and they can't make any money off of it. They've been trying desperately to raise the price of oil by cutting production, but all they manage to do is spike the price temporarily and it continues to fall. I wonder what will happen in those countries as they lose this vast wealth. Soon, they'll be nothing but dust pots once more. Except for Venezuela, which will just kinda rot. They'll see Chavez' true colors soon.