As oil protests spread, as motorists grimace and groan on each visit to the pumps, as prices jerk upwards, analysts as well as ordinary members of the populace are asking questions.
What and who is to blame for such rapid increases? When will it stop? What will a future with supersonic oil prices look like? As commodity and food costs climb, and as environment degradation spreads, is the golden weather of growth and rising prosperity over?
While laws of supply and demand are widely accepted as the basic reason prices are rising, especially because China and India are quickly moving towards the front-row of the grid of world oil consumers, "speculators" are often blamed for the size and volatility of recent leaps.
The money invested in commodity funds has soared from $US13 billion five years ago to $US260 billion now, with most (78%) of this in oil.
Index and pension funds on the New York energy exchange are buying and selling oil for financial gains, certainly not for their own direct use.
Those funds have been moving away from sharemarkets - and towards commodities like oil and gold - because of poor share returns during the past two years.
Surely, like the 1637 Dutch tulip bubble, the 1720 South Sea bubble, the 2000 dot-com bubble or the various housing and stock market booms and crashes, the doubling of the oil price in a year (10 times what it was in the late 1990s) is indicative of more than just market fundamentals.
Surely, despite the likelihood of a long-term upward price path, speculation is behind extraordinary price hikes. Many other analysts, though, argue that these speculative prices simply reflect the way a short-supplied market can work.
The so-called oil futures speculators are not actually hoarding oil to create artificial increases, and plenty of willing buyers remain for the oil itself. Take your pick on the various explanations.
There are those who blame various geopolitical causes, the tensions between the United States and its big anti-capitalist supplier Venezuela, the regular bombs and kidnappings in Nigeria, the Middle Eastern difficulties. The weak US dollar, the currency of oil trading, and the grouping of oil exporters Opec, the bogeymen of the 1973 and 1980 oil shocks, receive blame as well.
Then there is everyone's favourite, the oil companies, which have been making record profits. United States regulators have spread their investigations beyond speculators to the refining, transportation and storage of oil.
The causes of the magnitude of the sudden price increase have relevance because if speculators are indeed responsible, then the price could collapse suddenly - not to what recently was thought expensive at $30 a barrel but low enough to make risky and costly oil recovery uneconomic.
Because of that possibility, long-term planning, oil exploration and development and the creation of expensive alternatives to oil are discouraged.
Individuals, companies and nations - including New Zealand on some of its "think-big" projects - lost badly when they reacted intemperately to the earlier oil crises.
Nevertheless, one positive outcome of the rapid rises has been to jolt common thinking to look towards new futures.The idea of peak oil has become mainstream, even if the timing of it is debatable.
Just as the earlier oil shocks led to the widespread abandonment of oil as a power station feedstock, so the present rises are already leading to overdue changes.
Countries in Asia are beginning to abandon wasteful oil subsidies, consumers in the West are examining their practices and momentum is building towards a new future less dependent on the oil addiction. Given the perils of potential climate change, these types of responses are urgently needed.
The present price shock is, in fact, doing much more than carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes or propaganda in changing habits and turning people towards shades of green. Finally, after decades of promise, impetus might even be building to wrest oil's virtual monopoly on transportation.
