Sorry Alex you are incorrect that oil consumption went down during the oil embargo of the 70's. We did suffer great long gas lines then but the oil consumptioon stayed level and even went up for 2-3 more years. It only went down when President Carter told the world to turn off all the extra lights and turn down the heaters and forced Detroit to made cars more efficient and forced people to drive 55 MPH and so forth. Now no one liked these measures much but the net effect was to put a big dent in oil consumption. Look at any long term graph of oil consumption and it will show a significant world wide decrease of about 5-10% starting about 1977 and lasting for 3-4 years while Carter was in office. Well it took the world oil powers about 2-3 years to really really realize that the US might be serious about saving oil and that their best customer might gain back some control so they flooded the market with oil to try to stop this conservation idea.  Well the price of gas/oil went down drastically after that due to the oil glut in the early 80's.

Now in the current market no one and I mean NO ONE is really conserving much oil and NO world leader is showing anyone much incentive to really save oil.  So until that happens I don't think the price of oil will go down much....

 Just my two cents,

Bill