DGDevin wrote:

My folks lived through the Great Depression, and I inherited the
attitude that you scrape the peanut butter jar clean, not because you
can't afford another one but just because waste is a bad idea. So
when I see a lone driver using an Escalade or Suburban to go pick up
a carton of milk it makes me shake my head. And then there is the
issue of why every year we send umpteen gazillion dollars to
countries with governments that don't like us too much. Why are we
paying oil money to Hugo Chavez to buy Russki fighter jets, or for
the Saudis to fund fundamentalist jihadi preachers? Surely burning a
dirty, increasingly expensive fuel that enriches hostile regimes is
not a smart long-term policy, is it?

We get very little oil from Saudi Arabia. As for trading with the enemy,
there are a couple of very good reasons to do so:

1. We get something at a price cheaper than it could be had otherwise.
That's to our advantage.

2. With trade, we draw a hostile regime into the core. That is, interconnect
nations so that it is in THEIR best interests to mute their belligerency.
China is a perfect example. As they interact more with the rest of the
world, their insistence that their's is the only way diminishes.

We burn a dirty, increasingly expensive fuel because we have to do so. The
United States is a HUGE country. Texas is as large as France and the United
Kingdom. Combined. Germany covers 138,000 square miles. The U.S. is
twenty-seven times bigger! (at 3,718,000 sq miles). Only Russia and Canada
(and maybe China) are larger, but they have vast areas that are almost
uninhabitable (due to weather).

So, then, to move goods and people we require a lot of oil. Then, too, we do
so because we can. Like medical care, we can afford it, so we do it.