Our Addiction to Foreign Oil

Jim Wallis in Sojourners wrote yesterday about the oil spill. He agrees with the President that: “For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. . . .  For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades we have failed to act with a sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again the path forward has been blocked, not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor. The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.”

Wallis observes that the last eight Presidents have called for an end and promised to end our dependence on foreign oil. He recognizes that our addiction to foreign oil produces a foreign policy “based on dependence on corrupt oil regimes, on sending our sons and daughters off to fight and die for their crude product, [and] on both fueling and paying for the violent terrorism that is eventually used against us.”

He says we should undertake a mission to end that dependence, and we should. When one looks at the changes that would have to be made to accomplish getting past our addiction, I find little grounds for optimism. When hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising press us to be a materialistic, hedonistic society and when campaign finance laws give soulless corporations enormous political power, it is hard for me to imagine how the political will and the willingness to sacrifice can be generated to cure our addiction. I suspect that a cure for our addiction will eventually be forced upon us, and it will not be pretty.

cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com