The email was as follows:
CASE 1: A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to the grocery store he pays 60 cents a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time. One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to 72 cents. The next time he buys groceries, eggs are 76 cents a dozen. 
When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, "The price has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly". This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. He checked around for a better price and all the distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The small egg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The distributors then have to raise their prices to the grocery stores. And on and on and on.
As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there. He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000 dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of eggs.
Then week before Thanksgiving the price of eggs shot up to $1.00 a dozen. Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, "Cakes and baking for the holiday". The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the price of eggs goes up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family cooking, baking, etc. happen.
This pattern continues until the price of eggs is 2.00 a dozen. The man says, " There must be something we can do about the price of eggs".
He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop buying eggs. This didn't work because everyone needed eggs.
Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need. He ate 2 eggs a day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery and buy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day.
The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs in his cooler. He told the distributor that he didn't need any eggs. Maybe wouldn't need any all week.
The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told the huge egg farms that he didn't have any room for eggs would not need any for at least two weeks.
At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs. To relieve the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buy the eggs at a lower price.
The distributor said, " I don't have the room for the %$&^*&% eggs even if they were free". The distributor told the grocery store owner that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying again.
The grocery store owner said, "I don't have room for more eggs. The customers are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time. Now if you were to drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the customers would start buying by the dozen again".
The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers but the egg farmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, those chickens just kept on laying. Finally, the egg farmers lowered the price of their eggs. But only a few cents.
The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, "when the price of eggs gets down to where it was before, we will start buying by the dozen."
Slowly the price of eggs started dropping. The distributors had to slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers.
The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn't buy at a higher price than they were selling eggs for. Anyway, they had full warehouses and wouldn't need eggs for quite a while.
And those chickens kept on laying.
Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwing away eggs they couldn't sell.
The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to where the stores could afford to sell them at the lower price.
And the customers starting buying by the dozen again.
CASE 2:Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry. 
What if everyone only bought $10.00 worth of petrol each time they pulled to the pump? The dealer's tanks would stay semi full all the time. The dealers wouldn't have room for the petrol coming from the huge tank farms. The tank farms wouldn't have room for the petrol coming from the refining plants. And the refining plants wouldn't have room for the oil being off loaded from the huge tankers coming from the oil fiends.
Just spend $10.00 each time you buy petrol. Don't fill up your tank. You may have to stop for petrol twice a week but, the price should come down.
Think about it.
As an added note...When I buy $10.00 worth of petrol that leaves my tank a little under quarter full. The way prices are jumping around, you can buy petrol for $2.65 a gallon and then the next morning it can be $2.15. If you have your tank full of $2.65 petrol you don't have room for the $2.15 petrol. You might not understand the economics of only buying two eggs at a time but, you can't buy cheaper petrol if your tank is full of the high priced stuff.
Also, don't buy anything else at the gas station; don't give them anymore of your hard earned money than what you spend on petrol, until the prices come down..."
just think of this concept for a while.
I am not very convinced about the feasibility of this idea.
You cant stop hens from laying eggs but you can reduce the output of an oil field. As far as I know Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sets production quotas for production however these generally serve as mere guidelines and a country can reduce production at will. Secondly, for those who do not live near petrol pumps (gas stations) will have to drive extra distance multiple times a week if the do not top up their tanks. In many rural areas or along the interstate highways/expressways there are no pumps (gas stations) for several kilometers. Furthermore, power stations running on natural gas can not just buy less. Thus according to me the above mentioned solution is highly unfeasible! :(
I think that while buying lesser quantities isn't feasible, genuinely reducing our reliance on oil is possible through finding alternative energy sources and oil substitutes. While this approach should include the use of biofuels it shouldn't be restricted to biofuels alone.
Many claim that what we can really do is that we can start taking biofuel very seriously. Oil is definitely going to get over some day and we are going to have to switch to greener energy. The current increase in oil prices might just be a boon and promote further research about green fuels. Contrary to popular belief, biofuel isn't the technology of the future that will take decades to create. Its not on the drawing boards, it already exists! Almost all cars in Brazil run on pure ethanol or ethanol blended petrol. Biodiesel is already in use in many countries of the world.
Ethanol produced from yeast fermentation of crops like sugarcane and maize can be used as an alternative to petrol. Plants such as oil palm, soybean, and jatropha which naturally produce oils can provide an alternative to diesel as after heating the viscosity of the oils of these plants reduces and they can be used directly in diesel engines. Alternatively the oils can be chemically processed to produce processed fuels such as biodiesel.
However, biofuels do not really give us a way out of the oil crisis. They bring along with them their own set of problems. Most of the ethanol which is produced today, is produced from sugarcane and maize which are food crops.
Is it really alright to produce ethanol for fuel from these crops when more than a million people die of hunger every year? This is the classic moral argument against ethanol. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for a year. If the world ethanol production was to be doubled or tripled to reduce fossil fuel consumption drastically, so many millions of tons of grain would be used for ethanol production that there would be an extremely drastic food shortage. Today's food shortage is nothing compared to the global famine that would occur in such a scenario. Even the current increase in food prices is attributed to increase in ethanol production. Larger and larger percentage of maize and sugarcane is being used for ethanol production and many farmers are switching from other crops to these crops. Government policies do not help to address the fuel vs food. In India, jatropha plantations are being encouraged. While it would be great if fallow land is brought under jatropha cultivation, however if farmers switch from food crops to jatropha India might lose its food security while trying to achieve energy independence. Many countries including Brazil and US give biofuel subsidies which unfortunately result in more and more grain being diverted to ethanol producton.
Therefore, I do not think that biofuels alone are answers to our woes. According to me what we should do is
- In addition to biofuels, we should focus on increasing the efficiency of of current engines. This will help to reduce the demand for oil.
- Subsidies for both fossil as well as biofuels should be ended. This will reveal the real cost of oil, the sharp increase in prices will automatically encourage the consumers to cut back on their wastage and to replace the oil guzzling machinery.
- Use of pure biofuels should be temporarily restricted even though we have cars that run can run on pure ethanol because increase in demand for ethanol will lead to increase in production which might result in a food crisis . Thus as of now petrol blended with 10% or 20% ethanol should be used.
- More unused land should be brought under energy plants cultivation but certain laws should be passed and enforced to ensure that land currently being used for food production isn't diverted to biofuel plantations.
- Hydroelectric, Solar, Nuclear and Wind power plants should be constructed to replace fossil fuel based thermal power plants.
Oil industry is huge and big bucks are definitely involved in all this. The most important factor to ensure that right steps are taken to reduce reliance on oil is political will. Its sad that there is no green party in Indian politics today. No party considers environmental protection as its main agenda. Voters should make renewable energy an election issue if they want to ensure that the subsequent government takes enough steps to encourage alternative energy to reduce our reliance on oil. Thus the first step we need to do is elect someone who has something definite in mind about solving the problem of expensive imported oil. Finally, my message to everyone is next time any candidate comes asking for your vote ask him/her what will he do to reduce our reliance on expensive imported oil.
____________________________________________________________________ Note : This piece of writing is a compilation of my thoughts on the subject. I do not have any expert knowledge of the subject whatsoever and readers are advised not to rely on this writing for any details about anything. This writing does not claim to be a reliable souce about anything.
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