What do you think will happen if gas prices go up to eight dollars a gallon?

Question

I hope it doesn't get that high!

i want your opinion.

Answer 1

I think I'll be walking my kids to school! I couldn't afford to pay $8 a gallon with my gas guzzler!

Answer 2

alot more crying at the pump, alot more crime happening and car pooling

Answer 3

I'll still be driving.

Answer 4

Public transportation (trains and buses) will be more crowded. Plus, more people will be fitter since they'll just walk to get around.

Food prices and just about everything will soar.

Answer 5

People will continue to pay them until they literally can't afford them.

And then the world will explode.

Answer 6

It might be cheaper to skip a day or two at work a week, depending on what your pay is.

Not all towns have places you can walk to or a public transportation system.

Answer 7

There would be less traffic on the freeways, and more people would use different methods of commute.

Answer 8

We'll all drive less and pay more for everything we buy.

Answer 9

I'd say its already over $5/gallon in Canada (it is north of the USA :P), so it defiantly will happen, and i bet we will go into another depression, worse than the one in the 30s.  Sure hope not though.

Answer 10

i think that if it goes up that high people will.,

start riding their bikes.

start taking thee city bus.

start walking places.

i think that people will also just use whatever is close to them.

then there will be the people with more money then a lot of people

who will continue their normal life.

Answer 11

it might not get that high as soon as u think!!! but hopefully by then we'd have a lot of electric cars, hydrogen vehicles or the like to choose from making the value of gas go down...

hey, listen to this though... its actually quite possible that prices will go waaaaaaay down in the near future ("near future" referring to the course of years tho).  some predict that they may even drop down to $30 a barrel!  why? well because if new technologies are developed making it very profitable for big companies like shell or exxon to produce oil from the so called "oil shale" deposits which exist around the world, then we may have a temporary solution to the issue of oil shortages plaguing us today.  

consider this: 2007 estimates of saudi arabia's oil reserves place the amount of oil present there at around 260 billion barrels.  this is the largest known oil reserve in the world, containing about one-fifth of the world's known oil supply.  now... oil shale deposits.  first what u gotta understand is that these deposits dont actually contain liquid oil as we know it.  instead is contains kerogen which is a precursor to oil making it somewhat valuable, but requiring some additional refining techniques on top of that already required by conventional oil.  

the largest currently known oil shale deposit is the green river formation within the united states in the area of colorado, utah and wyoming.  but just how much oil is believed to be contained here? estimates currently place the amount at about 1.5 trillion barrels! over 5 times the amount of oil in saudi arabia's reserve!  not all of this oil would be recoverable, of course.

if we just say though that 800 billion barrels are recoverable - most likely an underestimation of what would be realistically extractable... and we also establish that the united states consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day, then simple math tells you that those 800 bil barrels would last the united states over 109 years.  it would also release the US from its dependence on other countries for oil.

so if theres so much potentially recoverable oil in these oil shales and all this economic independence to be gained, why arent we tapping in to these resources?  because it would cost oil companies a lot more money with current technology to extract oil from shales rather than from dwindling oil reserves already existent around the world.  in addition, oil has never previously been mined from these resources on a large scale due to the associated costs and immature technology, making the endeavor of extracting oil from shales a bit risky, financially.

in the future though, as mining oil from current reserves becomes even more costly, we can only expect that oil companies will get more serious about discovering better ways to obtain oil from oil shales.  and when the day that we start putting our nation's oil shales to good use finally comes, hopefully we'll be able to look back on the days of $4/gal gas and tell ourselves with sincerity that we'll develop cars that run on something other than gasoline before oil prices ever reach this point again.