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As Bernd Debusmann says in his Reuters column with oil at $140 a barrel and gasoline $4 a gallon at the pumps the US needs to quickly enter into a new era of creativity and innovation to break its dependency on oil but desperately lacks the political leadership to as the country's 'business as usual' political culture entrenches it as much in the past as the physical infrastructure that has grown up to support a society predicated on two legs bad, four wheels good and the cheap availability of oil.
There is no doubt that necessity is the mother of invention but its going to take a lot of inventiveness, change , pain and time for the US to wean itself off its ravaging addiction to oil and get round to solving other energy related problems but having a blinkered Texan oil dynast running the country for the last 7 years certainly hasnt helped , in fact its been a bit like having a hardcore crack head running the state drug rehab program , Bush has pushed for vested interests not change and this hasnt made it any easier for whoever is going to replace him not that Obama or McCain seem to have that many ideas of their own.
America uses a hugely disprorportionate amount of the worlds oil , is the worst carbon emmitor but has lost out to China as the worlds worst polluter but right now the pressure is on for the US to do better by cleaning up its act but how much pain ordinary Americans have to endure in the meantime is anyones guess. Debusmann lists a number of changes the oil crisis has already brought about , fewer car journeys, SUV's out, hybrids in, more people working from home, inner city properties becoming desirable as people realise they can no longer afford to commute from way out of town but these are reactive piecemeal changes that are easy to make, they arent necessary going to bring down transportation costs which are driving up food and commodity prices because essentially all they are doing is lengthening the craving aspect of being addicted to ever more expensive oil.
Some of these reactive changes could have unforseen negative consequences , the migration back to the cities could see poor people squeezed out and rural type poverty become entrenched in the commuter belt , reduced mobility obviously has dire economic implications and in the land of the car probably profound psychological and political consequences as well.
Ordinary Americans are demoralised by the shocks the oil, energy and food crises have inflicted on the economy, probably more shocked by this than anything else that has happened since 9/11 , the American people feel under attack from the global economy and there doesnt seem to be any sign of the calvalry poised on a hillside ready to charge down and save the day. The situation is tragic as behind the complex set of inter related problems poverty is further creeping into the American way of life and a lot of people are going to sink further and deeper into it before there is any real relief as the way we live is going to seriously have to change.
One alternative view has the Great Plains transformed into a vast windmill energy generating area but as James Lovelock points out in the Revenge of Gaia, putting our faith into untested technologies that also screw up the environment when scaled isnt really a viable option, the overly ambitious corn ethanol program's horrendous impact of the food crisis is a case in point, The only technology at our disposal that we can quickly slot into place to cope with demand for cheap reliable energy is nuclear technology, its not without dangers as Lovelock is quick to point out but the dangers of dithering over solutions that are not going to be viable solutions or will just stack up more problems in the medium to long term is far greater in terms of managing natural resources and of course our survival on the planet. There are no quick fix or painless solutions and whatever rapid changes can be made are just as sure to exacerbate withdrawal symptoms from an additiction to oil that we now all see has helped prop up an unsustainable American Way of Life that has been largely taken up elsewhere as the Western lifestyle. As Lovelock says, its not simply about changing technologies to continue developing, its about wisely using technology to retreat to live within the limited means available to us on the planet. .
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