Full disclosure: I'm a Texas native, so I have the right to whine a little.
Lots of people on this site have blamed the Big Three for producing the kind of vehicle that plunders resources and is totally unnecessary for most transportation applications. They are correct. Unfortunately in a free market system, demand fuels production, and then production feeds marketing strategies producing a feedback loop. The SUV is a gas hog because it is a big box with a big engine, which is about the dumbest idea in aerodynamic design that has ever been produced since the days of the Model T, when they didn't know squat about aerodynamics. Why did the Big Three do it? I can almost find the point in time when it started.
In wayback times (1986), my English husband and I moved to Texas so he could get work. Kansas, where we had lived, was undergoing a contraction, but things in the Lone Star State were booming. I subscribed to Texas Monthly at the time, because they had had a few good progressive writers and the occasional good piece of investigative reporting. Unfortunately they also indulged in a lot of puff pieces about the lifestyles of the newly successful. One of them, the cover article for August, "The National Car of Texas," was about the Suburban, then the only SUV on the road. It was marketed before then as a vehicle for pickup drivers who needed an enclosed space or more passenger capacity. Here is a link to the intro and picture, which will give you the flavor of the piece. I don't have a subscription, so unless someone does, and is willing to contribute some blockquotes, you'll have to make do with my paraphrasing.
The gist of the article was that hip young parents were buying Suburbans because they were ever so handy for lugging kid paraphanalia, not wimpy like minivans, taxed as cheaply as a truck, and safe in an accident. (!) When the article came out, it was difficult to get used Suburbans, so they were expensive and rare, but suddenly it became the vehicle that said you were a serious parent who had money to burn. When my kid first started school, most of the moms had minivans. By the time he was in fourth grade, everybody who could afford one had SUVs of some kind. You were not a responsible parent if you didn't. I was roundly chastised for driving my kid around in an ancient 280Z.
The manufacturers meanwhile had noticed that they could produce a vehicle that didn't have to meet automotive mileage standards as it was classed as a truck, could be built on chassis that they already were producing, and could be sold for a lot of money. It seemed that what was good for Texas was good for Detroit as well, since it got people out of dinky foreign cars and back into solid, very profitable Detroit steel. You bet they were happy to produce them by the multiplied millions, and market them heavily. They had had a bad run of years before that, much as they are having now, and the SUV probably saved their companies.
At the root though, it was about demand, and the moms of Texas are no doubt responsible for starting a trend that has melted the polar ice caps, blanketed cities in ever more pollution, and drained the oil fields dry. If it survives, Detroit will realize that there's money to be made building lots of cheap, attractive, fuel efficient cars. Hopefully, the moms of Texas will just have to have them.