Check out the furrowed brows and slackened jaws of the hosts and analysts at CNBC's Fast Money as Matt Simmons (who we interviewed recently) quickly describes an energy doomsday scenario. "We could literally run out of usable diesel and gasoline and then we would have the Great American Disaster because within a week we don't have food."
The conventional wisdom these days is that speculation is driving the price of oil to artificial highs. Simmons, of course, is saying just the opposite: that today's record-breaking prices are actually too low. He thinks that if we wait for a non-existent price "bubble" to burst we'll get caught in a devastating shortage. But if we move quickly to curb our consumption and get used to rising prices we can avoid the Mad Max scenario (and make some healthy changes in the meantime).
