Oddly enough in society the relevance of a resource and its cost are often quite detached. Imagine Facebook/Google/Apple/Coke/etc all shut their doors, never to

Oddly enough in society the relevance of a resource and its cost are often quite detached. Imagine Facebook/Google/Apple/Coke/etc all shut their doors, never to open again, tomorrow. There'd be no particularly dramatic change in society. By contrast, imagine all oil producing nations suddenly stopped exporting any oil tomorrow. Once domestic reserves of countries ran out the entire world would grind to an incredibly rapid halt. Electricity, transportation, shipping, and everything would stutter and then come to a near complete stop. And society itself would likely break down in very short order. It's not about the dollar value of oil, but about its relevance to society. You'd think those two would be strongly correlated, but they're not. This is why oil and the petro-dollar have so much inherent value. Without oil society collapses, and USD is the gateway to oil. That 'is' may be changing to 'was.'