Well, I never said we'd actually get gas back down to $3.00 or so a gallon, only that when the price gets much higher than it is, it will be a lot easier to use that as an enticement to circumvent the already weak environmental restrictions. Whether or not we reap the economic benefits or it all goes to China is, as you say, a matter of marketing. Right now it looks like China has a bigger stack of chips than we do, and unless we intend to start defaulting some of our markers abroad, we are only going to continue heading downslope. From a planning perspective, I think it would merit consideration as to logistics for transportation for the average joe, either to buy ever smaller, more fuel economic vehicles, or else to co-locate to someplace within walking/biking distance to/from work.

I am planning on becoming a teleworker in the next few years, mainly so that I can stay on the farm and work my other job, which will be running the farm, but also because 90% of what I currently do can be done from any location, including home. That ought to save me on fuel costs. Now all I have to do if find a 20 mule team to pull the combine so I am not pouring precious gasoline into mechanized farm equipment.

Welcome to the last phase of the industrial age; globalization. If there's one resource China and India still dominate, it is cheap manpower. We could probably cut our highway construction costs in half if we could employ a thousand chinamen at the Chinese market labor rate with picks and shovels in place of one track-hoe. Come to think of it, didn't we build a railroad that way?