No president has really been serious about conservation and renewable energy, but Jimmy Carter at least made a symbolic statement in the 1970s by having some solar panels installed on the White House roof. Shortly afterward, however, Ronald Reagan, backed by the oil boys, defeated Carter, and that was the end of that —one of Ronnie's first acts in office was to order that those damned solar panels be taken down and junked. Since then, every president has made the obligatory Earth Day nod to solar, wind, and other alternatives as a means of breaking America's self-destructive oil habit, but there's been miserly commitment behind their rhetoric. Using its political and lobbying clout, King Oil has been able to maintain its hegemony over energy policy, its stranglehold on the economy, its preeminence over the environment, and its priority call on military action.
In the quarter century since Carter tried to tell us something important with his solar gesture, every president has been in deliberate denial about where America is headed if we don't get off oil. And now, we're there:
• America's oil consumption has increased 25% since 1980—we're now chug-a-lugging 20 million barrels of oil every single day (up from 16 million in 1980).
• Global consumption is above 83 million barrels daily and rising rapidly.
• U.S. gasoline prices are approaching $3 a gallon.
• To keep the crude flowing, the U.S. is deploying its military all around the world at a staggering cost in money and lives.
• The chemical refuse of our gasoline addiction is fogging the globe with greenhouse gases that are altering our planet's climate,
The world's supply of recoverable oil is fast running out. An energy policy (or the lack of one) that leaves us with no alternative but swilling more oil is suicidally stupid. But where's the leadership? Neither the White House nor the Congress, neither the Republican nor the Democratic party, has a plan for coping with what is clearly a looming disaster. They're not even discussing it.
Instead, the Bushites' babble on blithely about letting corporations move their drilling rigs into the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is akin to handing out umbrellas to people standing in the path of a tornado. Aside from the environmental and spiritual damage of drilling in ANWR, even the most optimistic assessment says that there would be only enough oil in the entire refuge to supply the U.S. for 800 days—so paltry that the companies themselves have shown little interest in making the investment to drill in such an unpromising field.
Cut the leash
If our leaders are too corrupted, too weak, and too unimaginative to cut America (and ultimately the world) free of our tether to Big Oil, then we must do it ourselves. A good place to begin is for us to start buying cars, trucks, and other vehicles that get 500 miles per gallon.
Whoa, Hightower, there you go again, breathing some sort of strange fumes and talking nonsense! 500 mpg? That's science-fiction stuff.
No. It's in the here and now, using two affordable, available technologies that are already achieving amazing fuel economy on America's roads and cutting pollutants to little or zero. Combined, the two technologies create "plug-in, flexible-fuel hybrid vehicles," for which a more manageable moniker would be "gasolineoptional," or GO cars. [ read more ]
What the hell's happening here? Why is my bank in the tank? And my house and job? And my retirement money? Even my state's teetering on the brink of broke! Who did this to us? Fair questions, but we're not getting honest answers. 
