Yesterday the price of a barrel of oil on the open market hit $92.

I think we are seeing the end of cheap oil as a fuel. It will fluctuate rapidly for a while, but the writing is clearly on the wall.

For one thing, with China and India becoming more prosperous, they can and will be able to pay more for oil to use for their own vehicles, adding billions of new consumers to the demand for any oil pumped out of the ground, driving prices up. Pun clearly intended.

For another thing, our descendants will curse us almost daily for squandering our oil and coal resources on using them as fuel, when they are and will be more and more obviously more useful as feedstocks for plastics and other materials derived from organic chemistry. Once burned as fuel, they will be gone irretrievably. OK, not irretrievably, since you can grow more oil from algae. But it is going to be wickedly expensive, and resource intensive. And slow.

The only reason we think fossil fuels are faster and more convenient is because we haven't been around for the millions of years it took nature to make them in the first place. And when the bean counters tote up the efficiency of fossil fuels against their rivals, they usually don't include the 2% efficiency of nature's plants and algae in turning the sunlight into easily available energy in the first place.

We have been spoiled brats, using up our parent Earth's resources with no thought to how hard and long it took to create them in the first place. Now they are almost gone, and winter is coming.