Americans use way too much oil.  The following chart is part of the information from the CIA factbook. The data is from late 2008.

OIL CONSUMPTION BY COUNTRY

America uses, by far, more oil than anyone on earth.

During the current phase of the British Petroleum oil leak catastrophe, I keep thinking about people who lived in the past.  How did they survive without oil and gasoline?  Certainly they did, and they did it well.  Entire advanced civilizations were built before the days when humans used oil and gas — civilizations such as the Mayans and the Romans and Greeks and Egyptians.  You could even argue that in many ways, they accomplished more of value and substance than we are accomplishing now. In 2010, average Americans don’t accomplish a lot. We run around buying and selling things and pretending our lives are so advanced because we can hop in a car and go anywhere we want.  Americans don’t make much, we don’t invent much, we don’t influence much.   Much of the world has left us in the dust in many ways.   Worst of all, some Americans don’t believe in science at all,  and it’s hard to argue that people who are highly influenced by talk radio hosts, or Twitter streams, are very advanced either. (See: Idiocracy. )

Ancient people really made a lot of their shorter life spans, despite their lack of gasoline.  Look what they did without oil.  They are responsible for the beginnings of physics and astronomy, artwork, music, literature, exploration all over the world, philosophy, math, agriculture –  and they built huge, complex cities.  They somehow managed to live incredible lives without cars, or electricity, processed foods, or TVs.   People used to live in communities, and they traveled together and even lived together.  Everything they needed was in one city, not spread all over hundreds of miles. They ate local food, they didn’t take vacations hundreds of miles away every year.  A very long trip was a once in a lifetime event, if done at all.  Yet many of them they managed to be educated people, with good lives.

Now, contrast this with us.  We are modern human beings, the most advanced in history, (we tell ourselves)  completely and utterly and absolutely dependent on ancient fossil fuels, buried in the ground, that have to be extracted and burned.  Traveling anywhere, at any time, burning as much gas as we can afford is our right,  we think.  It just so happens that in 2010, we need lots of dirty, filthy oil in order to be free to travel as fast and far as we feel we should.  Unfortunately, in between digging, drilling, extracting and burning oil, sometimes the stuff leaks.

For some reason, Americans accept all of this as a necessary evil, the cost of living in the times that we do.  “Accidents happen,” people have been saying.  But they don’t have to.  Our energy and fuel system is all created by people.  It’s not the way things [...]