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Will insane gas prices finally pummel us into evolving? How bad will it get?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

It should be a truly fascinating — albeit possibly enormously grim — thing to watch, one of the more dramatic and revolutionary market-driven shifts in modern history, upheaving everything we've become so accustomed to and changing behaviors and attitudes and alliances and political agendas and ass-girths and no I'm not talking about the "Lost" finale or the new 3G iPhone or how Brangelina's twins are a sure sign of the Second Coming.

It's the massive, painful spike in gas and oil prices, that most wonderful/frightening harbinger of doom/change/turmoil known to modern society that is fast turning into a calamitous global hurricane, ready to wreak havoc on just about every aspect of modern life, and that includes food and transport and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll and just about everything else that makes America, America.

What, too dramatic? Not by much. The initial signs are all in place. The price of a barrel of oil is soaring, production levels are peaking, the world economy is shuddering in the face of a permanent production slowdown, even the most staid economists and prognosticators are blinking hard and saying holy hell, we really have no idea how this will all shake out.

You can already feel the initial clenching. As a nation, they say we're already driving about 4 percent less than we did last year, which translates into 11 billion miles per month, which, for gluttonous and wanton Americans, is technically considered "a lot." SUV sales are tanking fast and trading in your old gas hog is increasingly difficult as rampant feelings of comeuppance and I-told-you-so smugness from small car/scooter/bike owners spread across the land like a viral Weezer video.

But that's just the beginning. It appears that the dour, much-maligned peak oil sages from a few years back were at least partially correct, and the let's-drill-everywhere weasels from the war-for-oil Republican Party were, quite naturally, wrong. There are simply no indicators that gas will drop back to the $2 range anytime soon, there is very little "elasticity" left in the global petroleum market, and China and India are dipping larger and larger ladles into a smaller and smaller pot, all pointing to a very good chance that the United States will see seven or eight bucks a gallon just in time for the final SUV manufacturing plant to switch over to making Segways and sun visors.

Big deal? Hell yes it is. No other crucial, universal market commodity has seen a 200-400 percent price spike in such a short period. It means a much broader, more dangerous upheaval in global energy, given how that damnable petroleum is everywhere, from food production to manufacturing, shipping to construction.

It will be heaven, it will be hell. President Obama will likely hesitate not at all to instigate a massive hybrid/plug-in/alterative fuel initiative, challenging inventors and Big Auto alike to finally get their asses in gear and knock it off with the internal combustion BS that hasn't changed in any fundamental way in, oh, about 150 years.

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