“In truth, gasoline prices today are taking less of a bite from our pocketbooks than has been the norm since World War II.”
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6440

I don’t care for high gas prices since I do quite a bit of driving but until the gluttony for status symbol vehicles is eliminated we will never see much of an improvement. People would rather bitch about the problem while not making any changes themselves.

I have two offices, and I split my time between them. I work from home one day a week, walk to one office 3 days a week and drive the other day. Really, it is possible to find alternatives – you just have to be flexible and willing to get a little uncomfortable for the sake of exercise, your wallet, or the planet (pick your favorite).

You can have a relatively low cost for transportation, but to get there, you better like living next to your neighbors, since you’ll have lots of them. Three car garages, 3000 square foot houses, and house plots measured in fractions of an acre, much less acres, will be a thing of the past: say hello to condo towers with first-floor malls and subway stations in the basement. These are actually quite comfortable once you get used to them, but Americans who think that cities like Houston or LA are “too crowded” may have a hard time adjusting.

PS: I lived a year in Beijing and several months in Shanghai. You don’t know “crowded” until you’ve been in a Shanghai subway station at rush-hour…

In many ways it is a financial decision– not a decision of luxury. In order to justify the cost of living in a city where public transportation is an option, gas would probably have to jump significantly. $10? $12? My mortgage payment wouldn’t cover half the rent of city living in many places. The city I live in (near) has no area where walking to everything is an option. Even downtown is not an option, as you have to travel 5 miles to get to a grocery store in the suburbs.

Squeezing 300 million people into large cities doesn’t seem like a very good option to me either. That has its own problems.

I do agree with you on nuclear power. It’s much cleaner than most other sources. But it will never happen here. The same people that want us to reduce emissions are often the ones that would refuse to build new nuke plants because of the nuclear waste and tiny chance of criticality. There is also the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) problem of building new plants. It would drive property values down, so nobody within miles of a new plant is going to be pleased. If constituents don’t want it, politicians will block it. Anything to keep office.