You know those small TV screens they have in office building elevators? (Because God forbid you stand quietly and think during the elevator ride.)

The system in our building is from a company called "Captivate" and in part to gainsay their name, I often close my eyes on the elevator ride. It's usually a bunch of drivel and advertisements on the Captivate screen anyway.

But today I looked at the screen all the way up, and it said that since the mid-summer gas price highs, Yahoo searches for "hybrid cars" have dropped 80%. Eighty freakin' percent! I haven't researched the veracity of the claim, but if true, (and it sounds plausible) that's a very interesting number....suggests that there was a lot of interest in hybrids that was *solely* motivated by personal economics, not concern about the environment, and not concern about dependency on foreign oil and our funding of both sides of the war on terror.

As Friedman pointed out in the NYT today, the oil/gas price drop is nice for OPEC longer term; it will likely reduce interest and investment in alternatives, and then when such alts go away, OPEC can raise prices with impunity. (Or at least raise prices to extent they can impact world prices by reducing supply.) Nice game plan, especially when you consider that high oil prices result in gushers of cash for certain people who are hell-bent on the destruction of the United States.