Hey, I'm just guessing too. But I'm thinking the reduction won't be 10% for every household.... more like 5% for some and 20% for others.
For example: We heat with oil. We consume about 1000 gallons of heating oil a year, which is about 40% of all of the petroleum we buy as fuel. (We have efficient cars and short commutes.) At current oil prices, it isn't worth the money to trash a perfectly good oil furnace and replace it with one that burns another fuel. If heating oil goes to $6 a gallon, it will be. Boom: Chez Fisher reduces fuel oil consumption by 40%. Even if we decided not to switch over the furnace, we might well look at an electric flash water heater and space heaters, dropping our oil consumption by 10-15%. And that's without changing how we drive or how warm we keep the house.
Another household which already heats with natural gas can't get this kind of reduction, of course. But they don't need to for the consumption changes to have an effect on the economy.
Re: Responses to the last spike
For example: We heat with oil. We consume about 1000 gallons of heating oil a year, which is about 40% of all of the petroleum we buy as fuel. (We have efficient cars and short commutes.) At current oil prices, it isn't worth the money to trash a perfectly good oil furnace and replace it with one that burns another fuel. If heating oil goes to $6 a gallon, it will be. Boom: Chez Fisher reduces fuel oil consumption by 40%. Even if we decided not to switch over the furnace, we might well look at an electric flash water heater and space heaters, dropping our oil consumption by 10-15%. And that's without changing how we drive or how warm we keep the house.
Another household which already heats with natural gas can't get this kind of reduction, of course. But they don't need to for the consumption changes to have an effect on the economy.