No other country on earth was as smitten with the automobile as the United States. The oil industry itself originated in Pennsylvania, but the love affair that has driven us to cling to oil addiction took a while to get rolling. Like the bicycle, the automobile began as a luxury item. Unlike the bicycle, rank and file consumers held off until Henry Ford devised a production method to bring costs down. The Ford Model T put the automobile in reach of ordinary workers. A thriving industry took American industrialization into the fast lane.
After the Second World War, the American hotrod drank deeply of cheap gas while forging an image of freedom and daring and mechanical creativity. American cars were big, with big engines. Speed limits crept higher and higher, allowing these beasts to gallop across the miles of wide open spaces in the American interior.
When the first gas crisis hit in 1973, it didn't serve as an early warning that we should try to detox from petroleum. Worldwide, economies just retooled to accommodate the rising price and manipulated supply. Fuel prices pushed upward ever harder on the cost of living, but people paid it. The United States instituted a 55 mile per hour speed limit, which brought the average cruising speed down around 65 on most highways for a while, but that has been rescinded in most places now. Good luck finding the road less traveled nowadays. If you do, it probably goes somewhere very obscure, or the stretch isn't very long.
Emission controls have improved the smell and cleared up the worst of the brown haze that hung over any populated area. Improved fuel economy standards help a little with the environment. Only steadily climbing wages and salaries keep up with relentlessly inflating prices. Consumers focus only on whether they can afford to fill the tank, not whether they should push hard on elected officials to shift to energy sources that don't carry the vast liabilities of petroleum.
Gasoline equals freedom of movement in the American mind. That means oil. Electricity means convenience and entertainment in the home and in rechargeable handheld devices. Who really cares what fuels the power plant? Coal seems so 19th Century, and yet it still fuels about 19 percent of electricity generation in this country. Natural gas fuels more than 40 percent. Straight-up oil fired power plants account for one to three percent of energy generated. Combined, that's more than 60 percent.
Renewables account for 21 percent of energy generation. Biomass is considered renewable, but it still involves combustion, requires energy in the machinery used to harvest and process whatever is being burned, and contributes to the environmental impacts of commercial forestry.
The most visible connection Americans have to petroleum use is their vehicles. For more than a hundred years, generation after generation has grown up with engine noise, clouds of exhaust, crashes, and increasing traffic congestion. We're obsessed with the price of their fuel.
Electric vehicles have become a common sight, but their drivers have to plan carefully to make sure that they can recharge as needed. Recharging takes a lot longer than a quick pit stop at a self-service gas station. An electric vehicle represents a conscious choice to accept inconvenience. The inconvenience may seem trivial if you live where you can charge at home and never venture far, or have access to charging at a place and time that coincides with work or another interval when you wouldn't need to go anywhere anyway. But what if you need to make an unexpected trip in the middle -- or near the beginning - of the time you had set aside for charging?
We live by the car. We may die by the car. Our dependence will continue to help politicians who enable it, and even glorify it as a defiant expression of liberty. It's really nice to be able to hop in a speedy vehicle, protected from the weather and relatively secure, to arrive fully rested wherever you're headed. I get that. As much as we all hate the downsides of their ownership and use, generations have accepted the costs in order to have the benefits. The majority has spoken over and over. A sizable chunk of them will throw in behind some nightmarish politicians rather than risk losing access or having to pay higher prices for their fuel. It's freedom juice.