Oil and Gas prices are determined by international free markets where oil from all over the world is traded. We only consume about 20% of international oil so our influence as consumers is limited to that degree. And the 20% is shrinking every year as US demand diminishes (largely due to conservation and improved efficiency, i.e., better gas mileage). China and India each consume more oil than the US every year as their standards of living increase. And their consumption increases every year, so they become more important and influential customers for oil every year, and they bid up gas prices.
Thus, every year more and more control of gas prices (through demand) passes to China and India. Even at the very high prices that $4 gas represent to Chinese/Indians who only make a fraction of US wages. Even at those high prices the demand increases every year as they industrialize and more people enter the lower middleclass (and luxury class, too).
To the average Indian or Chinese the concept of driving a 30 foot motorhome hundreds of miles almost every weekend while getting only 8 mpg seems an extraordinary thing, even a fantasy. Nobody does that in their countries.
Even though their cars get 40mpg and they buy gas by the litre (quart) there are so many people trying to squeeze into the next higher class, and so many super rich who drive expensive gas-guzzlers, that their consumption is really booming. China has 4 times the US population and India 3 times, so they have immense headroom for their consumption to expand into, even though they pay the same base price as the US ($4/gallon) and have huge taxes added on.
We may get a chance to live that poor miserable life of the Chinese if the lords of Wall Street outsource more US business and jobs and our wages drop to meet those of a Chinese peasant (thus forming the New American Peasantry).
All of this makes sense if you read the facts at the EIA.org (part of the DOE) and more useful (to highschool grads who were awake in their math classes) than the oversimplifications that the DOE itself sometimes publishes. It also helps to read American Petroleum Institute (API) journal or other trade papers that have facts as well as editorials.
Our best hope for the future is to develop indigenous energy sources, not dependent on foreign countries, such as wind, solar, methanol, geothermal, (maybe even nuclear) which is not subject to international markets, because foreigners hungry for oil luxury (they learned it from us) are going to bid up the prices even more. In the long term we must develop alternatives to oil or suffer tremendous loss of living standards. Fortunately that can be rather easily done, if we decide to do it, and set about that work the way that we built the railroads and the highway system, the airplane system, canals, and all the armaments, etc. You know, the way we won the war, back when we knew how to do those things.
So enjoy your 8mpg RV while gas is only $4/gallon because it can only get worse.
