Jeff Rubin says oil prices will rise but that we can cope if we do the right things. I too, believe that we can adapt.

Rubin was the chief economist at CIBC World Markets for almost twenty years. He was one of the first economists to accurately predict soaring oil prices back in 2000, and now he is now a sought-after energy expert.

I like what Jeff Rubin has to say:

“If we continue to commute 60 miles each way in SUVs, we’re going to get screwed. All of a sudden, peak oil will equal peak GDP; that’s not just an economic recession for a couple of quarters, that’s a world of no economic growth. The point of my book is that, while we can’t do anything about triple-digit oil prices, there’s a whole lot we can do to make sure that when we encounter triple-digit oil prices, they don’t have to be so devastating as in the past.

“We have to reduce, in effect, oil per unit of GDP, and the way we do that is to go from a global economy back to a local economy because a global economy is an extremely oily way of doing business. And that switch isn’t something that the Federal Reserve Board or US Treasury or the Bank of Canada or the European Central Bank is going to put in place; that is going to be the aggregate result of all the micro decisions that consumers make about what we eat, where we live and how we get around.

“I think triple-digit oil prices will lead us to make the right decisions on those fronts, and the result will be a very different economy than the economy we know.”