Justin at Classical Values … well … points out that recent petro-doomsayers have recent historical antecedents likely who as they bet against human ingenuity. Jet fuel from coal. While it may be that higher gas prices, by say an order of magnitude or so, might have positive social effects which come with their devastating economic effects such as rebuilding a societal sense of community by getting us to travel a little less, this may not come to pass. Indeed, the one constant we see with prognostications and their predictions is that most of them fly astray. We look at Jules Verne and other past Science Fiction dreamers and while they predicted scientific and engineering acheivements correctly, the social effects of those acheivements were not predicted correctly.
In line with a long lost (long lost=out of print) work of speculative fiction I mentioned earlier, The Courtship Rite
One aside, The Courtship Rite is not a book for everyone. The society depicted has tossed aside very many of our deeply held taboos. You find these taboos were set aside for reasons that make sense … but it remains likely to be off-putting for many readers. The connection between preditive accuracy (sagacity?) and fitness to rule was based on one government in Rite who selected their Exective based on the person who was most accurate at predicting the future.
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