If you feel for them, you could offer to carpool with them (if not to work, due to location differences, then on weekends for shopping/errands/kids sports leagues that your families share in common) and offer to pay part of their gas bill.
Not being snarky, it's a genuine idea if you wish to help. Since their vehicles are SUVs, they can carry multiple people and thus offset the higher fuel costs of driving that vs. a hybrid or fuel efficient 100% gas/diesel driver doing the carpooling in your neighborhood.
The point of the article has very little to do, if anything, with saying "I told you so," it is surfacing some very real, tangible positive things that happen when a society has to tighten its belt with rapidly rising energy costs. My husband bike commutes to work (26+ mile round-trip) one day a week now and takes our Escape Hybrid one day a week. Why? Because we also own an F150 Supercrew 4x4. That gets less use as we voluntarily ration gas, refusing to refuel the F150 more than once a month. And we're not scraping by... it's just a common sense thing we can do to ease the drain on our pocketbook and be an example to others, *some* of whom can do similar things.
100 ways to get higher fuel economy in ANY vehicle ->
http://ecomodder.com/forum/EM-hyperm...ecodriving.php