Roughly speaking, the real cost of something is the amount of labor that went into it. If everything took 10% more labor, GDP would indeed fall 10%. But if the price of oil went up because of speculation and inelastic demand, noone’s labor would be affected (roughly speaking). The average price of goods would not rise. The goods that take the most oil would become more expensive, but a finity of money would force all other goods to fall in price. (More specifically, the labor component of costs will fall.) This will make everyone earn less, but be no less productive. People will have less money to spend on goods which continue to cost the same amount. So in fact in a sense your intuition is correct. But there would be a handful of individuals who would now be far richer (as much richer as others poorer), and as long as they kept buying the remainder of the goods (which is frankly a big if), production and distribution of goods will have no reason to shrink.
Economics is a fascinating field of philosophy if you wrap your mind around it.
In a way, it’s all a roundabout way of saying, “if the world keeps making as much oil as it ever did, why would it produce any fewer goods?”
Of course, that ignores the secondary effects that a big shift in the economy would cause. But the evidence is that the economy has become much more tollerant and flexible than just 30 years ago to any sort of movement (and its manipulators have become far wiser), that we should get through it probably with hardly a recession. 9/11 didn’t hurt the economy one bit. The huge trade deficit, the plummeting dollar, the exorbitant price of oil, the mortgage crisis, have barely affected us either. Oh, sure, people can bitch about their crappy wallmart jobs, but real indicators of unemployment, etc., compared to historical trends are stellar. The Fed can now stimulate the economy and get growth without inflation. In part this wasn’t possible before (the internet and evolved financial institutions are all reasons). In part, the Fed used to not know what the fuck it was doing. In the 70s, for example, it threw a bunch of money in then burned a bunch of money out then Nixon wrote a law to hold prices steady then the Fed did a bunch more dumb shit. Even worse, the Great Depression was the result of retarded, extremely fragile financial arrangements coupled by a federal reserve that, as the first thing it did, enacted a big contraction of the money supply which guaranteed recession. The reason the Fed did that is because money meant gold back then, and the US wanted to hoard it.
In today’s world, we should be a-ok. A mere shake-up of who’s rich and who isn’t won’t send us into the dark ages. Especially if we hang a big fat windfall penalty on the oil companies and use the money to cut taxes.