What is there to ration? The rising prices have nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with investor speculation.
This article was written in 2004:
Oil Reserves Some is actually quite amusing:
Quote:
The worry is whether there is something worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s waiting for us — particularly that the United States gets heavily hurt because we burn a quarter of the world’s oil,” said Princeton University geologist Kenneth Deffeyes.
Deffeyes is perhaps the leading proponent of the work of the late M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil geologist who accurately predicted, in a controversial 1956 paper, that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. Deffeyes has applied Hubbert’s work to global oil supplies and has come up with his own projection for peak global production. He expects world production to peak around Thanksgiving of 2005, give or take a few weeks.
But with a surge to record oil prices in recent weeks and gasoline consistently selling in the $2 a gallon range for most of the summer, energy issues have played a surprisingly low profile in the presidential campaign. The reason, experts say, are clear: There are no simple solutions.
“The presidential candidates aren’t going to stand up and say ‘I’ve got bad news.” said Deffeyes. “They don’t want to promise you blood, sweat and tears. So it’s not being debated as an issue on the presidential campaign.”
No more 'cheap' oil
Oil industry officials say there are still promising regions that have not been fully developed, including areas of Alaska and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the U.S. that are currently off limits. But they generally agree that the days of major new finds of cheap oil are over.
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Three years after the prediction that we'd be running out of oil, we're still at it.
Gas ration coupons were distributed during WW2 to support the war effort by preserving gas usage for our armed services, so there was a gallant reason for doing so.
What we need is good old-fashioned gas wars, where gas station owners would run "sales", forcing their competitors to match or beat the price. Unfortunately, it is the oil companies setting the prices to keep pace with the crude prices and still maintain their really hefty profits. Someone needs to step up and announce he'll take only 11 mil a year instead of 12 mil in salary so that his company's prices are reasonable.
There also needs to be a cap on speculative oil pricing.