Electric cars are getting there, and there is always domestic natgas production in the US. It won't be fun, but that's what we get for dragging our feet. The US had this happen in the 70's (oil embargo). It's been 40+ years. Its our own damn fault.
And while that is a relief, it is still very troubling to think about the implications for our transportation infrastructure as a whole (where consumer vehicles represent a minority fraction.)
How will we power our ocean freighters, our freight trains, our 18-wheelers, and our high capacity airplanes without high energy-density hydrocarbons (or with prohibitively expensive hydrocarbons)?
I can imagine nuclear and electric solutions (hand-wavy or hypothetical) to some of these modes, but could they be implemented on a global scale in time?
It makes me wonder what our transportation infrastructure will look like 100 or 200 years from now.
-In what non-obvious ways will we look backwards to people of the future?
-Will these people envy how cheaply we moved goods across the globe?
-Will they laugh at how expensive it was to move things across the globe?
-Will they even have the luxury of thinking about these things?
Pretty depressing if you ask me.
Here's the speech: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-...