It’s an unfortunate fact that stress has a way of making people crazy. At the moment, rising oil prices are creating a lot of stress.

One of the problems with our deep dependence on oil is that oil prices can (and do) swing wildly in relatively short periods of time. Between January 2007 and July 2008, the average price of crude oil paid by U.S. refineries went from about $51 to $129 per barrel, an increase of over 150%.

People, on the other hand, aren’t nearly so flexible. We don’t change where we live, work, go to school, or how we get to any of these places at anything like that pace. We can’t respond to a doubling of prices by cutting