One of the common ideas to pop up here as a result of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is the idea that we need to suddenly reduce our consumption of oil, or energy in general, in order to stop undersea drilling. It's a simplistic argument that doesn't really add up, for the simple reason that American oil consumption and American oil production have very little to do with each other.
Oil is a worldwide commodity. Its price is roughly the same anywhere that a tanker can reach. It's set by worldwide supply and demand. While the United States is a huge user, the big growth markets are elsewhere. So while it's a good idea for the United States to reduce its energy consumption, it has nothing to do with oil production here. After all, oil is largely produced in countries that don't even use much of it.
If reducing demand for oil reduced the risk of harm from production, then what do we make of countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ecuador, and for that matter the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries? OPEC was created to cartelize the price of the commodity, to raise the income of countries that don't use all that they can produce.
Yet the oil exporters typically have terrible environmental records. Oil is damaging the Niger delta in Nigeria, the forests of Ecuador, the tundra of Russia, and other production sites. It's a dirty industry, especially in places where regulation is weak and governments are corrupt. And striking oil is one of the worst things that can happen to a country: The wealth is usually concentrated among a few, and goes to make the leaders richer, the military more powerful, and the local oligarchs more wealthy. There are several Nigerias for each Norway, that rare exception that seems to have shared its oil wealth (from regulated offshore platforms) among the people at large while preserving democracy.
Oil companies seek oil wherever they can find it, if the cost of production and distribution looks likely to be below the world price. "Proven reserves" thus vary depending on price, since there may be $120/barrel oil that is not useful in an $80 world. This is just Economics 101 stuff, supply and demand.
The demand side for oil looks pretty strong. India and China are huge growing markets. China has started to develop a large car habit. India's population is growing fast and is expected to surpass China's by mid-century. Both have a standard of living well below that of the west, and any improvement in their standard of living will require energy. That's just the way it is. India and China are doing more than we are to develop new sources of non-carbon energy (LFTR anyone?), but they can't go cold turkey. And there's just no real substitute for oil-based transportation fuel.
So how do we prevent the damage caused by oil production and shipping? The obvious answer is regulation. This is where the corporate power game gets tricky. A corporation's job, under American law, is to maximize its shareholder's value. Shareholders count first, second, and last, and there are now "shareholder advocates" and "shareholders' rights attorneys" who will sue a corporation that is perceived as being too altruistic. In order to avoid this, a corporation is essentially required to do anything that improves its profit, up to what the law and regulations allow. Some corporations cheat, of course, but that is not something that "shareholders" can demand.
Since regulations should impact a corporations competitors as much as itself, the net impact of regulation in a competitive market should be small. It could raise or lower the price of the commodity a bit, based on the supply-demand equation, but it should not change competitive positioning. If BP, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Total and Lukoil all lived by the same rules and regulations, and the regulations got harder, they'd all raise their prices a bit. However, it is the corporate instinct to ask for less and less regulation. Hence we see far too much regulatory capture, when the regulators are taken over by the corporations that they are supposed to be regulating. And when regulation gets relaxed, it is, alas, essentially the duty of the corporation to take advantage of it.
Catastrophes caused by insufficient regulation are thus as much a failure of government as a failure of the corporations themselves. This applies to the financial catastrophe of 2008 as well as to the oilpocalypse. It applies to the telecommunications companies that are subverting the Internet and to the coal companies that are killing miners and destroying mountains. Corporate managers need to be subservient to the regulators that they try to capture. Regulatory capture is the common problem. To be sure, BP probably did not live up to even current nominal levels of regulation. And their tort costs may (should) end up bankrupting them. But that was a gamble that they took, where weak and corrupt regulators did not even enforce the rules on the books.
Since oil production has nothing to do with local demand, calls for drastic reductions in America's standard of living are counterproductive. We will simply be jeered as "tree-huggers", and the denialists will get more credence from people who wish they were telling the truth. It will play into the hands of Rethuglicans and reduce the chances of actually getting the needed regulation reimposed. Even if by some kind of magic those usage reductions occurred, China and India would suck up the oil, and America would just become another exporter. Of course we need to lower our energy consumption, but the only way to regulate energy production is to regulate energy production. And to quote Arlo Guthrie, "This time with feelin'".