Once Bitten... Will Americans Continue to Conserve Fuel?

As oil prices continue to slide away from the peak crude costs earlier this year, and as the price at the pump lags downward, will American's forget the hard lessons of the summer's high fuel prices and lapse back into the sleepy denial of the true nature of our current energy crisis?

Judging from recently released data from US DoT, the "mileage bubble" has yet to burst.

The U.S. Department of Transportation said Friday that Americans drove 5.6 percent less, or 15 billion fewer miles, in August compared with same month a year ago - the biggest single monthly decline since the data was first collected regularly in 1942.

But it's not uncommon for market factors like these to lag behind one another. As fuel prices start to look "cheap" again to your average American driver, will they start forgetting the pain of $4+ gasoline?

Many experts I spoke with at the Energy Freedom Summit in Chicago believe that these lowered prices are very temporary, and that our energy strategy is so inherently weak that almost any "glitch", storm, or supply chain attack will send prices soaring, probably beyond the record highs of this summer.

Robert McFarlane, former National Security Advisor for Ronald Reagan, went as far as to predict a massive attack on oil infrastructure in the next six months that would cause crude oil costs to soar over $200 per barrel, and cement the looming world recession, noting that a 5% cut in current production would mean oil would cost about $200/bbl.

While not everyone agrees with the certainty of the event, most did agree that should such an event occur, the damage to world population would be devastating - especially to the parts of the world where higher oil costs mean starvation and death, in addition to here in the West where it will mean job-loss and economic hardship or ruin for many.

It's my hope that the oil market have overplayed it's hand with the American people, and that the lessons of the summer of '08 will not be quickly forgotten.