Rich people will always have a way to do things that mere mortals do not. Nothing changes in that respect.

Poor, however, are not directly hit by rising gas prices. Really poor do NOT drive to begin with (well may be they do in USA, but not in the rest of the world). Poor driving and being hit directly by rising gas prices is a myth, based on the assumption that poor drive. Poor are mostly hit through secondary effects through the rise in food prices and general inflation.

That leaves the middle-class. Us. The big consuming masses.

We're rightly hit by rising oil prices and we are unlikely to change our ways unless constrained by price and availability.

My premise for a while has been that the very nature of forced energy conservation requires an accelerating rate of increase in oil prices.

I am of course assuming an accelerating net oil export decline rate. Let's take all consumers in all oil importing countries and break them into five groups, ranked by income, from lowest to highest. At the bottom of the bottom quintile, we have a poor Third World consumer. At the top of the top quintile, we have Bill Gates,

Each successively higher quintile has vastly more purchasing power than the lower quintile, and energy expenditures as a percentage of incomes tend to decline as we move up the food chain, and each higher quintile has a lot more discretionary spending that can be shifted to non-discretionary food & energy spending, as food & energy prices increase.

This would seem to suggest a requirement for an accelerating rate of increase in oil prices in order to balance demand against an accelerating net export decline rate.