All this gloom because America once exported oil and now "needs" to import oil. I say "needs" because it's about the same as saying America "needed" to import Japanese cars at a time America was exporting cars.
Look at costs. Most Americans spend more money buying a car, than the lifetime of fuel cost. 100,000 miles at 20 gallons per mile is 5000 gallons of gasoline. At 3 dollars per gallon that 15,000 dollars in gas. If said car was bought at sticker price of $20,000 you spending more money on car than fuel. Now, most American don't drive their cars 100,000 miles before buying a new one and they don't spend 3 dollars per gallon on gasoline. If you buy a car for 20,000 and pay 20% for 5 years, you spending another $20,000 in interest, if you pay 10% interest rate for 5 year you save $10,000 in interest payments.
In todays lower interest rate America are spending far less on average to drive X miles. What happens if you buying a new car every year- fuel cost become utterly insignificant as your cost. What happens if average American instead of buying a new car every two years, changes this to buying a new car every 4 years- big change in costs per mile to drive a car.
Currently cars are built better and last longer, and interest rate are low because this we could spend far more on price of gasoline and not have any different cost than say in 1980's.
There is no technical reason why we couldn't keep a cars for 10 years or even 20 years. There is nothing stopping Americans from buying cars for a lower cost, instead of spending $40,000 on a car, they could spend $20,000 or less. Therefore it's quite reasonable that we could buy gasoline at twice the current price and not have any significant difference in terms of our economy.
So, at the moment we have low interest rates, low unemployment- about 5%, low pollution, and growing at 3-4% in GDP. True that seems unlikely that things could continue this well into the future- but gloom and doom are not new things, but things could improve vastly. We could have less people commuting to work every day. Our aging population may make wiser decisions on average. Health costs could lower. We could finally open up the space frontier.