All I thought of is what it was like during the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency. People were buying cases of toothpaste and yes, appliances, like crazy, because it would only be more expensive tomorrow. The Hunt Bros. silver fiasco caused us to lose a lot of antique silver in this country to being melted down--I was just learning the auction business and we had to weight the silver and the weight value was often more than the antique value.

The gas lines, sometimes violent, and the even/odd rationing rationing that resulted, yikes that was really something crazy through. Tough getting used to having to plan your gas needs, the dawn of a new day. First time older middle class retired people got the chance to "play" with money, that is, invest it in anything other  than a savings account. CD's and similar were new and the rates were crazy and they all had as much fun as if they had gone to Vegas. As I am sure you know, there's winners and losers to all this stuff and we've seen more than a few "oil crises" with vastly different end effects. The Japanese were buying up the country and they were bashing Japanese cars in Detroit.

The weird thing was, inflation and unemployment hung around for a much longer time than the side effect manic things like panic buying and Japanese-car-bashing--people just settled down and got used to it and handled it more rationally.

And as part of momoe's comment implied, sometimes" oil crises" both high and low are of the type that can end with the snap of a Saudi king's fingers, other times the are big game changers, or they can be anything inbetween.

Besides global warming, one thing that could be a significant long-term game changer is our development of natural gas resource to compete with the few oil "barons" left. And hey... fracking part of that...,global warming part of that....as i said below, it's all inter-related.