Bullsh**t. Just because Saudi Aramco won't pump more, doesn't mean they are running out (and yes, its Saudi Aramco and other government-owned oil companies that control ~90% of reserves - heck, ExxonMobil is even starting to look into alternative fuels now!).
This isn't "running out of oil" - the world will not run out of oil this century. It may run out of "sweet, easy to get to/refine" petroleum, but the amounts of sour oil and alteratives are HUGE. People also overestimate the difficulty of getting alternative fuels into production in higher price environments - if $3-4/gallon were continued indefinitely, never mind any increases, biodiesel and biogasoline could be produced at a price competitive to petroleum-based fuels.
You want a solution to this "high energy prices" business? Here, I proposed one myself not long ago:
Solutions:
1. Additional drilling and, more importantly, refineries. Gasoline refining is a large bottleneck currently, and there has been little construction. Also kickstart drilling in ANWR, the Dakotas, and other sources.
2. Change U.S. emissions regulations, which at the moment harshly penalize diesel fueled vehicles. New diesel cars are lightyears ahead of their earlier counterparts in terms of quality and cleanliness; diesel itself generates slightly better fuel economy than gasoline. Fund biodiesel - which can be made from, among other things, manure and crop wastes.
3. Nuclear power. Shoot the morons who halted nuclear development in the 70s-90s, and start building new nuclear power plants, and refurbishing and updating older ones. This will reduce energy prices overall, replace oil burning (and coal burning, allowing coal-to-oil conversion), make hydrogen production and plug-in hybrids cheaper, and other nice stuff. Also build more hydroelectric plants, and solar/wind/geothermal where it can be done reasonably.
4. Process garbage using anaerobic digestion, plasma arc disposal, gasification, or other methods that can coax fuel and/or electricity out of garbage. These methods have the added benefit of reducing the load of garbage that has to be dumped or incinerated.
5. Relax tariffs on cars imported from European, Australian, or Japanese factories, as well as work to regularize safety standards with the EU, Japanese, and Australasian safety authorities. Basically, make things easier for smaller cars to be sold in the United States. Note that a lot of this is public perception - also true for diesels - that small cars are undesirable.
Note that this doesn't count hybrids - potentially useful, particularly "mild hybrid" technologies that aren't much more expensive than plain gasoline but add things like regenerative braking. Or the plain fact that new cars could easily shrink over the next few years, and are - sales of compact and subcompact model cars are skyrocketing, and automakers are rushing to bring out new models (thus my concern about small cars being undesirable is weaker than it used to be). Suburbs won't collapse just because fuel will be at $4, 5, even 6 dollars a gallon - the British have suburbs too, you know, and they drive (in spite of ludicrous anti-car policies and a far better transit network than most of the US); Australia also has high gas prices and they drive as well. You'll just see fewer Chevy Suburbans and more Chevy Aveos.
