MaryBeth, I see your point, to a point. However, it's somewhere between inaccurate and meaningless to speak of people as a whole because individuals choices of consumption vary so widely, and the only place human consumption is successfully reduced to zero is in the cemetary. If you're implying that others are more frivolous and wasteful than yourself, I wish you'd do so in a more specific manner, because to imply it generally is kinda misleading at best. Each person must choose for themself where to conserve and how much, and bear whatever blame attaches for their remaining resource usage.
As you know, back at the turn of the century (1900 or so) when the petroleum industry was first getting started, the major cities of the east coast especially suffered from pollution that most today would consider unbearable. It piled high in the alleyways and was the cause of significant sickness and infection, even death in certain cases. Horse manure posed a huge filth and sanitation problem to urban dwellers by it's concentration. The automobile was viewed by many as an almost miraculous solution at that time.
I mentioned in another thread that I drive a 1-ton Chevy truck with a 350 V8, which gets about 11 or 12 miles to the gallon. You might think on that basis that I'm environmentally terrible, a big-time waster of petroleum extracts (I hope you'd take mercy on the fact that I frequently need to haul 40 bags of concrete or 50 2x12 floor joists or 60 sheets of drywall). However, other people know that I keep my 350 square foot cabin at about 58-60 degrees in the winter, and they say "that Parker, he's using less heating fuel than anybody around."
I have an acquaintance that is so proud that she bought a hybrid car, you'd think she was single-handedly saving the planet. Yet when I tell her "Well, so you're using more hydropower, which you believe is killing fish, and if you were on the east coast, you'd be using more coal-fired electricity, which pollutes the air..." she gets all cranky.
My point is, not all people face the same problems, hold the same priorities, or choose the same solutions. All energy has an "extraction price", to deliver it to the customer in a usable form. The ratio between the different kinds fluctuates with the respective markets, and we adjust to that as best we can. We don't all do it alike, so saying "people are addicted to their consumption based lifestyle" (even if largely true) is a gross generalization, and bound to end up in error.
Parker
