$4 gas? How about $8 gas?

Oil doesn't grow on trees.

Not $10/barrel oil, not $138/barrel oil.

Three things:

1. Stop your whining, especially if you had kids. Where do you think the increased demand came from?

2. Politicians, stop your pandering. There is never a bad time to implement a carbon tax. Show some guts.

3. Ever heard of the profit motive? Let's all remember that, in this capitalist system, the oil companies are not in this as a public service. They are there to make billions of dollars in profit. Love it or change it.

When I was a teenager in the early '70s, the planet had two billion fewer people than it has now. But I saw rampant growth all around me. Wide open Texas? Maybe on a stretch of highway between Midland and Marfa, but I grew up in Dallas, at the time the eighth largest city in the United States, and in every direction, I saw the prairie going under. I saw the suburbs steamroll the "wide open" with asphalt and sprawling houses.

We always knew this was coming: $4 gasoline 30 years later seems cheap. Now, $5 will start to seem expensive, and $6 will actually make a difference. But we know that $10 gasoline is coming, relative to income and the U.S. dollar. We know it's coming. We just don't know when. Oil is like diamonds, except oil is not a girl's best friend, and oil is not forever. You can get by in life with one modest diamond. One. Try that with a tank of gasoline. And yet, every day, there are millions of barrels less oil on Earth than there were the day before. When it comes to oil, gone is gone (except that it hangs in the air and thus in our bodies as a waste product, biting us in the asthma and the atmosphere).

We need expensive oil and pricey gas to get us to grow up and stop behaving like spoiled brats. The problem is that very few people are getting rich off all this. It is time for the governments of the world to conserve and protect our precious natural resources.

Especially when those resources are priceless.