Gas price hike

Without my knowing it, Gasoline prices have now reached almost 180 yen per litter. It was only this May that we could buy it at around 150 yen.
Fishing boats for tuna went on a strike, stock prices slumped, fuel surcharge for airplane is skyrocketing. It seems everyone in the world is complaining about the trend.
But is it really a bad thing? My personal view is it is still not expensive enough. Far from it. It should be probably ten times higher.
At the current price level, people only stay in the notion of "how to save oil". But the situation is perhaps more serious than you imagine. Since the oil resource is limited, price hike is a matter of sooner-or-later problem, not something we can avoid forever by just waiting for it to pass. If we must address the problem sooner or later, we must do it right now before it is too late. It is about time we changed our thought to "how to do without oil".
The earth has "sequestered" huge amount of carbon underground in the form of oil. Since we discovered the petrified liquid, we have dug it out and burn it, changing its form into carbon dioxide, CO2. Oceans and forests have been working as a natural buffer for the increase of CO2. Oceans soak up tremendous volumes of it and provide a means for it to be safely locked away. Forests absorb more CO2 if the CO2 in the air increases although regrettably they have lost the way to store CO2 except for within their living body. When they die and decay they return CO2 to the air.
As a researcher of the British Meteorological Office put it, there is a critical threshold where the oceans and forest stop buffering us from the CO2 related problems and actually start to amplify them. We may be getting pretty close to this threshold. Unable to adapt, many trees and other plants would die, releasing their stores of carbon and adding to the problem. A rise in the temperature of sea water would kill trillions upon trillions of tiny marine organisms that eat up CO2 to create their shells which accumulate stably on the sea bottom to pack away CO2 with them. Or sea water itself can contain a huge amount of CO2 but when its temperature rises it starts to release the CO2 dissolved in it. When we pass the threshold, we are highly likely to get into a period of catastrophe in which half of us might die out whether in a famine or wars caused by shortage of water, food, energy or whatever. So far, the Earth's oceans and forests have managed to save us form ourselves, but the time bomb is ticking.
We need a radical change in our way of life. Think what if we do not use oil at all. Or at least we can show our protest to USA of which guiding principle is to maximize near-sighted profit of American industry. Japan is guilty, though on a less scale, for just sticking to the "how to save oil" policy. Oil price-hike is giving us the best opportunity to give it a thought.
By the way such carbon cycles have occasionally happened in the distant past even without a human contribution. The good news is that even then, nature was quite wonderful. It is almost certain that eventually the carbon cycle would reassert itself and return the Earth to a situation of stability and happiness. The last time this happened, it took a mere sixty thousand years.... This mechanism is sure to work even after we destroy the Earth's environment but most likely without our existence.