Recently a lot of attention has been focused on the effect of financial speculation on the price of gasoline at the pump. While using gas price fluctuations for gambling purposes is undesirable, the effect of this use appears relatively minor (on the order of 10% to 20% of the pump price) when compared to the rise in pump prices since 1967. In that year, I bought gas for 20¢ per gallon at a Southern California big-box store. Using the general CPI for January, 2012 relative to 1967, the cost of a gallon of similar gas today should be roughly $1.35. It is more like $4.00, for a difference of $3.65. If we remove 60¢ for speculation, about $3.00 is unaccounted for. Is there some fundamental physical fact that could help us to understand such a large discrepancy?
Extracting energy from fossil fuels consumes energy. As the use of such fuels increases and the supply decreases (fossil fuels are harder to find, they are more difficult to reach, and they take a long time to produce from their raw materials) the amount of energy consumed in extracting energy from them increases. Eventually the energy needed to extract a joule of fossil-fuel energy will approach one joule, at which point there will be no reason to attempt further extraction. Long before this time, fossil fuels will have to be abandoned because the costs of their production will represent too large a percentage of the gross domestic product.
It should be noted that the costs of energy extraction include the costs associated with events such as the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills. (Similar costs are incurred by use of large alternative energy sources; consider, for example, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the reactor problems from the Tōhoku earthquake.)
Another prospective source of large costs is the problem of migrating large parts of the world's population to far northern areas of the planet and constructing the ultra-high-density housing and infrastructure needed to support the population crammed into the available land. There is reason to believe that these costs are consequences of the excessive use of fossil fuels. Technical mechanisms to mitigate these consequences are expensive, and their costs should be considered as costs of fossil fuel extraction.
I'm willing to believe that all of the mechanisms identified in the posts on this topic are involved in the recent energy price problems, but it seems to me that in the long term the underlying technical problems sketched above should be considered. By focusing attention on solar, wind, and nuclear energy Obama is pointing us in the right direction; it remains to be seen whether he will be able to organize the massive resources needed to displace an infrastructure such as we have built around fossil fuels. The concern for gas prices is useful, but can easily distract us from solving the really intractable problems we face in the long term.