The real threat here is inflation. If fuel costs keep rising, the price to produce everything goes up. Walmart recently raised the prices $.25 on almost all items citing fuel costs. It costs more for people to go to work, they need raises. Then the employers need to raise product prices. Then you pay more. A true tale of great sorrow and woe.
However, this will not last much longer. The Arabs have done this in the past, and as soon as we start seriously talking about alternative energy funding, they'll drop the price so much that fuel will be so cheap, we stop talking about alternative energy. Then they got us again, because a decade later they'll jack up the price of a barrel of oil to $60 again, and we'll be caught with our pants down worse than Morgbug in a fantasy football draft, because fuel was so cheap for 10 years that we had no need to come up with alternative energy.