I will never forget how I figured out the giant consumption boom was upon on us....it was back in the early 1980's, and I still recall two harbingers of wha was to come:
*There was a Sunday "Feature" section in the Louisville newspaper, that ran an article...I can almost recall the opening lines of this "lifestyle" feature, it said "If you think the ultra rich are driving Rolls Royce's, Bentley's or Mercedes sedans, you would be wrong.  The big ticket ride for the ultra chic and wealthy are now Jeep Grand Waggoner's, Land Rovers, and Suburbans, trucks with the room to carry Sam Walton's dogs."  It was the first inclination of what would be the SUV rage....who could have known...
*The other was, as it happens, a peice on "60 Minutes".  I had just bought my first VCR, and was looking for something to tape to test it out.  Most TV is almost unbearable to me, so I chose the one show I knew, and set it for Sunday at 7PM.  On that show, there was a feature piece about the 12 cylinder Italian super car, The Lamborghini Countach.  When I saw the promo at the opening of the show, I thought, "uh oh, they are going to carve this one up and spit it out", given the shows somewhat anti business and liberal reputation in those days, I was sure that the pollution issue, the fuel consumption issue, the safety issue involved in selling pretty much under the radar of the U.S. regulations (due to the car's low sales volume) a 200 mile per hour car for highway use....I was astounded when they air the piece....a fancier of the Ultra performance high end super exotic Italian car must have been gleaming with pride and joy...."60 Minutes" rode the Autostrada in Italy at 180 to 190 mph, and waxed almost poetic about the sound, the art, the fury of this great dream machine!  
The car itself had already been around since 1971, crafted by Bertone coachbuilding in Italy before the fuel crisis and oil embargo days, and was hanging in production of  few hundred a year, as a moribound and at the the time of the "60 Minutes" piece, Lamborghini was on the edge of insolvency.

After the "60 Minutes piece, the car began to appear in every movie and commercial, and was almost sure to be cast in any music video made in the early 1980's....and sales of a VERY EXPENSIVE ULTRA EXOTIC car TOOK OFF.

Such is the power of the mainstream media in America.  So, sadly, on the E85 debate, I do stick to my guns....GM and ADM along with the farm lobby have won the public debate.  The U.S. average citizen will not figure out until it's too late to matter that E85 did virtually nothing to save our nation from having to make much bigger changes on the energy front.  The only thing I regret is that by then, we may have wasted our great treasure of natural gas on this and on the tar sands boondoggle.  It is sheer insanity in a way, that all we would have to do is a bit of REAL re-engineering and creative design and we could avoid at least that.
Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout