Fuel is not an unnecessary luxury item unless you live in a cabin in the woods and your self-sustaining quality of life is quite low, and your lifespan near 1/3rd shorter than we have achieved today.
If you don't have a motorized vehicle, you still depend on the services of others who have one, and the more fuel (or energy in the case of electric) costs, the more those services and price of durable goods go up as well.
This hurts those making a (low) minimum wage the most, but if you want to do without all the infrastructure in your life that depends on fuel, have fun with that.
Nah, I don't want to do without it, I just want to use the tools of economics that we've always used, only for some reason, we have unreasonable subsidies on certain things simply to protect the unimaginable wealth of very few people.
Fuck up fuel prices and we'll very quickly be incentivized to push out the alternative means that, frankly, we should have made standard decades ago, and we could have.
I don't really tolerate the constant "It's too hard to stop criminally wealthy people from being wealthy!" attitude of large swaths of people that hate themselves enough to endlessly defend these ancient and absurd resources. Obviously, the point is not to end the use of oil as clearly it is needed for most things; just the hilariously ruinous burning of it at a scale that has literally killed us all, and we know that. We just pretend to not care.
I find this attitude to be inhuman.
Fuel is very much a luxury item within the current paradigm that we use it. Every person shitting on scaled, efficient public transportation, deploring inefficient cities and praising suburbs (which
only exist from pure racist desegregation responses from perpetually racist people...but that's another story that does cleverly dovetail into this one! ), single use vehicles, etc...is a threat to humanity. It's honestly quite intolerable to hear the same bitching and moaning from the very same clowns that only a few decades ago were screaming that removing lead from their precious fuel was going to destroy all of the jobs and the US with it. Yes, it happened, and yes all of these people are still alive, making the same fucking arguments about the same shit. They pretend they weren't those people then, but of course they were. You are old enough to remember.