President Bush was wrong in his State of the Union address, but he wasn't lying. America is not addicted to oil; America is addicted to Real Estate. The addiction was recently described colorfully in a
post on DailyKos by
VirginaBelle:
Our country is steeped in the idea of the pioneer movement, of finding some elbow room, to quote Schoolhouse Rock. We are born of an agrarian society filled with little farmers, and despite the industrial revolution, those Norman Rockwell images of the heartland in large part resonate as our national persona even among those who have never been through Kansas' neverending flats of corn or have ever had to drive ten miles to a grocery store. The idea of the cornhusker come to the city to make it big is the epitome of the American Dream. Maybe that is luxury, but it is a part of the national identity, and a terribly powerful motivator that runs deeper than most realize.
The American Dream, as I'll refer to this concept of the pioneer lifestyle, motivates people to live in small towns and rural areas. Many of these people involved in farming and other rural occupations are limited in their choices, and must drive great distances to reach suppliers and partners. The American Dream, meanwhile, also motivates people in cities who are faced with the prospect of higher priced homes, or a smaller home for the same price point, to consciously choose to drive farther to get a larger home for the same amount of money. As the suburbs of major cities fill up, the Exurbs are birthed--again, more space for the same amount of money, with a longer commute. In a densely populated city where private transportation isn't available, the only choice would be a smaller abode. But we have made the choice of the long commute/bigger house tradeoff
possible by ensuring--through our foreign policy--a key enabling resource: cheap oil.
It is generally agreed that oil is a finite resource. The question--to which we don't know the answer--is how much more we have. Whether it's coming very soon, or whether it doesn't happen for the next several hundred years, our high volume of usage--growing ever higher as the giant economy of China continues to grow--will eventually lead us to rising prices as the resource becomes more difficult to obtain. America has done little to encourage serious change in automobile mileage, as our CAFE standards are close to their 1980 levels. We spend oil like drunken sailors spend money. Only in 1999 was a mass-market gasoline-electric hybrid marketed in the U.S. for the first time, and it was not made in Detroit--it was the
Honda Insight.
Why should we look primarily at transportation?
2/3 of American oil consumption is for transportation--as our population increases, and cities and people spread further apart, we use more and more oil. Only about 20% of our oil supply is used for "stationary" purposes such as heat and electricity generation; but oil powers 95% of our transportation, of people and goods. So this tells us that 95% of our transportation relies upon the irreplaceable, yet finite, resource known as oil.
In 2001, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, cold war ideas were revived--perhaps if concentrations of people are a terrorist target, we should encourage
spreading out even farther! This might be worthy of consideration, except for the transportation problem. Until we have alternatives to gasoline such as fuel cells or telecommuting that put an end to working in offices as we know it, people will need to get to work. Further, even if we spread out our big cities further than they already are, people still congregate en masse for social purposes--terrorists could still target megachurches, sporting events, and other large gatherings as they do in Israel. Moving everyone farther apart won't solve anything, but will increase oil consumption.
We saw last September the effect that a small, but significant, cut in oil production can do--prices went up to at least
$3 per gallon in most places, $5 in some. This did not impact demand severely, mainly because it did not last. In the future, we won't be so lucky. We press on with the idea of drilling in the Arctic, that increasing production will put an end to our security concerns. Sadly, this is not true. Peak oil, like
global warming, is sometimes
dismissed as a myth. What is indisputably NOT a myth is that our
war against terror, and our simultaneous dependence on cheap Middle Eastern oil, is not strengthening our security. From Osama Bin Laden's "
letter to America" from 2002: "You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world."
Our pioneer spirit and desire to conquer the land, from sea to shining sea, has made our cities and our towns sorely dependent on cheap energy--and with our current infrastructure, that energy is in the form of oil. It would take tremendous, unthinkable levels of investment to change our entire economy to run on an alternate source of energy. Knowing that our cheap supply of oil will end, we should be stepping up our efforts to reduce our demand. Hybrids are a start, and with Honda and Toyota leading the way, Americans are being offered more types of vehicles with hybrid engines than ever before. But does the American Dream really require allocation of more and more land?
On one end of the spectrum is Atlanta, a sprawling megalopolis which--despite being ranked 11th in population in the USA in 2000--was ranked
#3 in number of square miles consumed , behind only Chicago and New York. Atlanta is beginning to see some urban growth in its downtown area, but is largely suburban and exurban. Other cities are moving in the other direction, one that bodes well for oil consumption--the upper Northwest is leading the way towards
green-conscious development. Without major geopolitical change, energy will continue to become more expensive, and sprawling exurban development--which provides houses on bigger land in exchange for consumption of more oil--is not the answer.
We're not addicted to oil. We're addicted to real estate.
From
Blog and Tan.