Re: hyper inflation in the USA?
One reason to not drill here is that oil is still relatively cheap here. Nearly no other energy source touches it for portable energy (without major government subsidies) . Battery technology may get good enough to power automobiles, but semi trucks, trains, and planes will be using oil for the foreseeable future. Yeah, the price is higher than it was... but so is gold against nearly all currencies.
Once imported oil prices start to rise to the point that other technologies become more competitive, then drilling and using our own oil makes sense... or maybe by then, we will have other portable energy sources and we can sell that oil to the rest of the world at a profit.
The website that Bennett posted had some interesting graphs tying consumer prices to spikes in oil prices... as basically everything gets that cost built in, raw materials, wholesale distribution, and then finally end product distribution (plus you pay more to go to the store and buy it, or have it shipped directly to you). That said, we *do* need to solve the portable energy problem. I'm confident that nuclear power plants could possibly augment or aid in entirely replacing our diesel-electric rail infrastructure. But we still transport a lot of goods via trucks and planes, two things that don't take well to batteries. Small nuclear power devices might someday replace IC and Jet engines but I think the regulatory aspects make it prohibitive to invest in.
We all know Hydrogen is really just a battery, and other battery technologies are getting better but just aren't there yet (especially for bigger vehicles). Additionally, fully electric and rechargeable hybrids still have the same hurdle (for large scale distribution) as electric rail does... power infrastructure capacity. We need *a lot* more power plants if this is going to work. Current generating capacity in the US is something like 800 GW. When you figure that the average automobile uses about 16 MWh of energy per year we have a long long way to go (granted, using purely electric propulsion, efficiency would go from something like 25% to the high 80s or low 90s, and maybe more with regenerative braking.
