It's Amazing What the Market Can Do

Without any additional government interference or distortions above and beyond their already stifling interventions by limiting energy development within the US, consumers of that energy are voting with their feet and dollars to use mass transit or getting out of their cars to avoid the higher energy costs.

No need to instill stifling congestion pricing taxes that will suck still more money out of taxpayers pocketbooks and into government coffers. That money is going into corporations and oil companies down the line, but here's the thing.

At some point, supply and demand in the US will reach an equilibrium - once the prices reach some point, demand will drop off and it will turn prices lower. When that happens, most people will resume their earlier habits. Some might stick with the mass transit and some will use more efficient vehicles.

Many will have no choice in the matter since they don't have mass transit available to them based on where they live, the nature of their commute or their job. For them, the energy costs are a cost they must bear unless they're passing it on to an end user.

I'm pretty lucky that I can walk to mass transit for my commute into New York City, but not everyone can find a house like that. And the problems with mass transit are numerous, even before one includes all the new riders coming into systems that can barely handle the existing crowds.

Still, the best way to lower the prices of gasoline and get the money cut off from those totalitarian and thuggish regimes that have the West literally over a barrel is to develop energy resources domestically. Nuclear power has been all but abandoned in the US, in part because people like Sen. Harry Reid oppose siting the national nuclear waste repository in his state despite national agreement to do so and has limited funding to starve the project to death, despite hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to create the repository.

Similarly, wind farm opponents seek to derail projects on specious reasoning - from potentially killing migratory birds to marring the views.

Each time these decisions are made, energy costs are driven upwards, and the failure to deal with these problems over time compound the costs.

UPDATE:
And it's also amazing what can happen when markets push for innovative designs. Companies will begin to cater to those needs, and instead of building gas guzzlers, they'll start promoting their more efficient vehicles and improving the technologies. Innovation will spring forth.

Yet, even here, the government will encroach and distort the marketplace, as we will see when federal law essentially bans incandescent bulbs in favor of other technologies, including CFLs. Rather than waiting for the technology to run its course and make incandescent bulbs obsolete, the government is basically pushing a technology that isn't quite mature and has a set of problems all its own (mercury disposal).