to RealityCheck:I have only minor quibbles with your post 85, as it is true that in WWII gasoline was rationed with consumption less than half what it is to day as the "suburban sprawl" Levitt towns that destroyed the nearby farms were post WWII developments. Women were baking their own bread, etc. and sticking the money saved in cookie jars to buy "war bonds" with. Kids wore hand-me-down cloths and shoe, not $200 tennis shoes and $70 T shirts, etc. I collected cans, and scrap steel to help build the tanks and landing craft, etc. All that saving (and recycling) helped hold the debt for fighting the war down but perhaps more importantly formed a frugal self-reliant attitude in the population that took a decade to die out and produce the current "I want it now as is my right, and sent the bill to future generations" attitude.
Yes, what you say is conceptually possible, except we are stuck with the inefficient suburban sprawl for several decades. What we lack is wide spread understanding of how serious the problem is. I´m certainly doing my part to reverse that. Without appreciation that this post WWII life style of Americans have adopted as the birth right is UNSUSTAINABLE, we lack the will to do what is needed: Raise taxes, cut entitlements, consume like we did in WWII until the debt to GDP ratio is below 50%. I.e. send Coach (maker of $400 hand bags) and the makers of $1000 golf bags into bankruptcy for lack of sales, kids make do with toys they made and bigger sibling´s hand-me down shoes and cloths, or Mom gets her mother´s sewing machine out of storage in the attic and bakes some of the family´s bread; Dad cuts wood on the weekend for winter heating instead of takes out his aggression on little white balls on a golf course, etc. etc.
Yes, what you say is conceptually possible, just not very probable to occur until forced by necessity and then its too late to avoid the collapse I foresaw coming and posted about here 7 years ago. Actually I was concerned for the US´s future years before that when I wrote my book, Dark Visitor, which is a cosmic horror story, written as if the true observations of an astronomer, that predicts the approach of a small black hole (from careful observations of perturbations of Pluto as it is invisible in telescopes since reflects zero light and still big enough to radiate only far IR photons.)
I was hoping to scare some of US´s brightest students into choosing to study the hard sciences instead of business and law by causing them check to see if Dark Visitor could be true. - Dark Visitor is a physics book in disguise, made for those who would never knowing open a book teaching physics. The slight change in Earth´s orbit (Northern hemisphere about 11% closer to the sun in winter and having mild weather with the huge snow falls typical in spring almost every day as S. Hemisphere´s oceans evaporate much more to provide global clouds of water. Six months later and farther from the sun, in cool to cold summer, this mass of winter snow is not entirely melted, and the increasing albedo accelerates the return of the new permanent ice age in the N. hemisphere. Where I live, we can still grow rice but all of Brazil´s coastal cities are washed into the sea as the torrential southern rains are essentially continuous). This all is possible, just not true (as far as we know). In less than a decade so much ocean water is stored on land that all ports are useless, etc. and less than 10% of world´s population is still alive. I.e. a possible cosmic disaster is predicted by Dark Visitor in hope those bright students will at least want to see if their plans to grow rich on Wall Street or as lawyers are valid or not.
PS - Reason why N. hemisphere astronomers have not reported the approach of the Dark Visitor is that Pluto is difficult or impossible to observe from there due to its current location in its inclined orbit plane. Also very careful measurements are required over many months, which only this S. Hemisphere astronomer has specialized in doing as continuation of his graduate student studies. He is rich with his own modest observatory as did not have any interest in the large cattle ranch he inherited. Everwhere, especially in the S. Hemesphere, telescope time is much too valuable to spend it looking at and precisely recording the position of boring Pluto.
BTW, "energy independence" for the US may not be as feasible as most believe: The NG and oil locked in these tight rocks comes out with fracking but only rapidly during the first year - then production from any one well falls down about 30% annually as the fuels diffuse from farther away. US will need to complete several (more than a dozen, I think) new wells EVERY DAY to produce it own fossil fuels - not economically feasible even with a great increase in the number of drilling rigs. Yes 100 or so years of oil & NG are there, but like current US economy, not for sustainable energy independence, so we will still need to be importing from cheaper conventional sources like those coming on line in East Africa and in Ocean near it and NW Australian Ocean, but being closer to richer China, they may not be sold to the US.