Want to Prevent Oil Spill Disasters? Stop Driving

An ecological disaster of enormous magnitude is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.

The BP Horizon rig blew up, listed through Earth Day, sank, and now a submerged oil well is spewing a river of oil toward Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Birds and fish will die, wetlands and beaches will be ruined. People will be outraged and people will cry. Offshore drilling -- "drill, baby drill" -- is front and center once again. But this time environmental destruction dominates the storyline.

In response to this situation political progressives need to amp it up a notch. The emphasis by many progressives on "green cars" has been a distraction. Progressives need to get over it. Green cars need oil. Too much oil. Instead, now is the time for progressives to reflect upon the relationship between oil and driving, and to question the way in which driving perpetuates the ecological destruction now underway in the Gulf.

To be sure, oil is fascinating. It is one of the most utilitarian natural resources known to humans. Oil stores a tremendous amount of energy, is easy to transport long distances by pipeline, rail, ship and truck, and can sit for a very long time without spoiling or degrading. It can be refined and distilled easily and has many uses. Its petroleum byproducts are used in plastics and pharmaceuticals, and are part of the energy system for agriculture and the transport of food. Before there was Silicon Valley and the Internet there was Houston and New Orleans and innovations in oil. Oil is in the laptops and servers that belong to all the progressives who balk at oil and oil companies. Oil undergirds the organization of everyday life in America. And we'll need to keep drilling for it.

But we do not need to keep drilling everywhere we can. We do not need to keep searching further offshore, or push into remote, wild areas, or burn nasty tar sands. We need to conserve. We need to reduce. Most importantly, we need to stop driving.

The most profound way in which America needs oil is though the system of automobility -- the combined impact on the built environment of the motor vehicle (cars, trucks), the automobile industry, the highway and street networks, and corollary services like gas stations, and the coordination of everyday life around the car and its spaces. America consumes 25 percent of the world's oil, and roughly 70 percent of that enables automobility. Much of this is for driving cars relatively short distances on a routine, daily basis. This adds up to over 21,000 miles driven a year per car. Ninety-two percent of American households own one car, and 62 percent own two cars.

No source of energy can replicate this level of hyper-automobility. The equivalent of hundreds of huge coal or nuclear powerplants would be needed to mimic this level of automobility if replaced with electric or hydrogen cars. Where are we going to build all of those powerplants? How much CO2 would come from building all of those powerplants and is it worth it simply to keep on routine driving? Retrofitting entire cities with new plug-in outlets will require new power grids and new powerplants -- to keep the level of automobility as we know it going. How can this be justified while we can't even "afford" as a nation to provide basic upkeep to bridges and highways, much less sustain a working public transit system? Meanwhile, wind turbines and solar panels are made from polymers that come from oil. The new "smart grid" and alternative energy future will be made from oil. Growing crops that are burned to drive cars also requires oil.

We need oil to make the "shift" to other energy paths. Yet the vast majority of oil that Americans consume is squandered for short drive-thru trips. We are seeking to expand drilling offshore and in remote areas to keep this system of automobility afloat. At the same time we as a nation expect to make a great leap to new energy systems but that will require lots of oil to build them. We cannot do both.