This from the California Tourism Board.

[The Grand Nudger]

Someone else will still use that fuel.  There won't be any reduction.  Environmentalism is frustrating.

Funny how it never has, then. In those sporadic periods of lower consumption, the surplus petroleum sits in warehouses and on tankers and the price drops like a paralyzed falcon. This happened as recently of March of this year.

The trouble is, the oil gluts and lower prices at pumps cause people to resume their old bad habits. It isn’t that the saved fuel is burned other places, it’s that the fuel is burned in the same places, but just a little bit later.

Boru

Absolutely.  In the short term a cartel can protect it's profits.  That falcon isn't paralyzed.  Case in point, the cartel knows that it can wait and sell at the higher price in the same region.  If that weren't an option, they would still sell their product to the next guy in line, and the next guy in line down the economic totem pole of wealth.  Burn it here, now..or burn it later, elsewhere, it's still burnt.  

I get that alot of people disingenuosly use this as an argument, in some sense, against reducing our personal consumption.  I'm telling you as a person -in- the environmental movement that we need to work on having realistic expectations for our efforts.  It's not realistic to expect that a world with the level of inequality currently in place is a world in which, when one well off person (or even an entire well off country) decides not to use one gallon of a very precious and useful thing, no one else will. They absolutely will, they're just priced out, for now.

Another frustrating (and deeply unsatisfying) component of our unrealistic expectations, is that we probably can't make the case for those people not availing themselves of that product. The US burnt through x amount of fossil fuels to develop. Telling someone that we've shut the door behind us is a losers bet. We need to deploy new models for producing the things we need and the things we desire. Reducing consumption in any specific case isn't even a bandaid, because it's categorically incapable of doing anything but assuaging a single person (or nations) conscience.