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It's true: Reducing regular oil usage is going to be more effective than any chain letter one-day boycott protest ever will. It's been said by everyone else, so I won't harp on it further.
The point I wanted to add is something ('bout the only thing, actually) that I learned from my Science and the Environment class. The size of an "oil reserve" is defined by two things:
a) The amount of oil that can be extracted with today's technology; and
b) The amount of oil that is cost-efficient for oil companies to extract -- that is, oil that can be extracted without the companies losing money for it. (People have touched on this briefly already, but it's a major point and one I felt was worth nailing right on the head.)
Those two criteria greatly limit the amount of oil readily available to us; I would estimate (wildly) that, because of these two limitations, we haven't touched about 70% of all the oil the earth has to offer. So when you hear people talking about how the "oil reserves are running low," they could very well be right. But that doesn't mean we're running out of oil entirely.
The trick for the long-term is to find other, stronger, cheaper means of extracting oil, or find another fuel source altogether. Reducing daily consumption, while a noble effort and worth striving towards, is only a band-aid solution and will only prolong the inevitable.
As for other fuel sources, I heard from somewhere that some people somewhere could produce some kind of universal fuel by basically melting down wastes of all kinds. The problem with this is that the energy required to produce this magic fuel is greater than the energy the fuel can produce itself. If someone could find a way to reverse this equation, I imagine it would solve our major oil issues. (I also imagine this person would become the richest person in the world over the weekend.)
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