Probably yes. Goldman Sachs yesterday revised their 3 month forecast for oil prices up from $52 to $75, and is expecting it to go up to $90 bucks a barrel within 12 months. The reasons are pretty clear – stores have finally cleared out the leftover inventory that got stockpiled when the recession forced people to zip up their wallets, and factories are starting to produce again—which means they need fuel. The BRIC nations – namely China – are starting to grow strongly again, which is also increasing demand. At the same time, supply is as tight as it’s been for a long time – as Goldman notes in its most recent report, the energy industry is running at 90 percent steam in the midst of the worst slowdown since the Great Depression. Which means it won’t take much of an increase in demand to really make prices soar.

Politics aren’t helping things. Saudi oil minister Ali al Naimi is now talking up $75 a barrel oil, in part because he’s worried about President Obama’s new green energy plans, and how they might affect the longer term viability of the Kingdom. I saw a Eurasia Group brief the other day that speculated that in the short term, Saudis might delay an increase in OPEC production targets, which could have the effect of raising oil prices quite quickly, creating inflation and thus putting the breaks on those “green shoots” in the economy you keep hearing about. The idea is that this would create a climate in which it would be tougher for Obama to carry out his plans.

Of course, over the longer haul, higher prices only increase the motivation to switch to green technologies. Either way, I hope Obama sticks to his guns on green. It is incredibly difficult, but possible, to wean a major rich nation off oil. Just look at Japan. The country, which on track to negative 16 percent GDP growth this year (no, that was not a mistype), hasn’t done much economically right in recent years. But its one unadulterated success has been its energy policy. In 1973, Japan imported 5 million barrels per day of oil. Today, with an economy that’s over double the size, it imports less than 4.2 million barrels. The goal was accomplished thanks to massive conservation efforts (including cities built purposefully to conserve energy), and a massive push towards rail travel (30 percent of Japan’s passenger traffic goes by rail, compared to 0.2 percent in the U.S.). If the U.S. could accomplish even a fraction of what the Japan have on the energy front, we’d all worry a lot less about the ups and downs of oil prices.