Oil went to $100 this morning, although apparently only one actual trade happened at that price. Likewise, the supposed boogeyman of $100 oil turns out to be a bit anticlimactic.

Remember those "try your strength" games at the carnival where you swung a hammer as hard as you could to ring a bell? I never got past the "wimp" or "pipsqueak" rating no matter how hard I swung, but the bell always beckoned at the very top of the scale.

Today, we are very close to that bell : $102.81 (in current dollars) is the highest price paid for oil, in 1980, after the Iranian Revolution. We could potentially ring the bell tomorrow, and then what? For the past several years analysts have been expecting that high prices would give way to lower prices by increasing supply and encouraging conservation but the price of oil has risen from $10 in 1997 to around $25 in 2002 to $100 now while demand continues to dog supply.

So my guess is that once we ring the bell, we'll just keep raising that bell, to $105, $110, until we actually feel pain and start conserving. And that eventual number could be a lot scarier than $100 oil. If you measure oil price by a more experiential Richter-type measure, you know that the price of oil doesn't feel as bad as it did in 1980, and that feeling is actually somewhat accurate. CAFE standards have made vehicles more efficient so that gas costs are a smaller part of middle class incomes than in the 1970's--which means they don't hurt as much as they used to.

Another reason for the rise in oil prices is that the dollar's value has fallen. But there's also another reason--in reality, only a few barrels of oil are trading at $100, and many are trading at as much as $50 less. Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Sankey wrote a year-end note to his clients that talked about this: "The quoted price of oil on the NYMEX and on the CNBC screen is West Texas Intermediate or WTI. WTI is light, sweet crude, which by its nature is easy to refine. The overall US crude oil barrel is becoming increasingly heavy and sour, driven by Canadian heavy oil supply growth. That presents refining challenges, expecially when combined with oil product legislation that requires gasoline and diesel to be lighter, and sweeter, and made without MTBE. A massive driver of high WTI prices has been the US refining system, which has been struggling, badly at times. The result has been specific pressure on WTI prices, which have far exceeded the average price of crude oil in the US. We liken the use of WTI as a market crude to using Sauternes to value French wine."

Sankey has many other tidbits in his piece, including the observation that high oil prices seem to be inspiring less supply and more demand, which bodes poorly for those of us who are dependent on the stuff.

To me, the report suggests that we need leadership, rather than market forces, to deliver us from this mess and the inevitable bigger messes coming down the line. In the best case scenario, $100 oil's biggest impact would be political, galvinizing consumers and politicians alike to start conserving fuel through more efficient cars, habits, and policies that would stimulate innovation. Unfortunately, I'm not hearing leadership of that sort from the candidates.