LEFT BRAIN / RIGHT BRAIN

Americans are addicted to oil. There's no getting around this fact. That big, burly S.U.V. you bought last year to cart your wife and 2.5 children around runs a quarter the distance on a gallon of gas as does a smaller, compact car. Of course, you bought it when gasoline was a buck a gallon, and you could fill that huge gas tank and run on it for two weeks for about twenty bucks per week. But those durn Saudis and their production slowdowns! How dare they make us pay so much for oil!

Well, I guess it's time we all come to grips with a hard fact. Oil is becoming scarce. According to scientists who are good at guessing, the World has about a forty to sixty year supply of oil left in the ground if consumption rates remain at or near current levels. Too bad it won't. If the oil is around now, well use it now. Screw the conservation...gimmee my Spute! I gotta get to the grocery store!

Now is the perfect time to take a step back and see where we are. In the Middle East, the OPEC ministers are cutting production, bringing the price of crude oil up to $30 a barrel, double of what it was just one year ago, and as high as the cost of oil during the Gulf War. Those countries that import that oil, the U.S. mostly, pays the price in higher costs for home heating oil, gasoline, and petroleum products. Even the price of Vaseline is gonna go up. But we need not suffer.

The U.S. is leading the world in renewable resource research. Solar, wind, water, and geothermal energy is plentiful in this great land. Nuclear energy, though unjustifiably villified as too dangerous, is technologically feasible and is actually quite safe despite it's critics. And new fuels and engines can increase the gas mileage of many cars already on the market. Fuels such as gasahol, and ethanol based combustables can be produced that burn cleanly and efficiently in todays engines. Hybrids can run on gasoline and electricity, stretching fuel efficiency. Research on cars that can run on propane, compressed natural gas, and fuel cells is continuing.

Petroleum products such as plastics and other compounds can be replaced by synthetic materials or materials recycled from landfills. Graphite is used increasingly as an alternative to oil lubricants. And other forms of home heating are readily available.

Conservation can also keep us from being held captive by our need for foreign oil. Using the family auto for necessary trips, carpooling, or simply walking can save a few bucks at the pump. Insulating a home, or replacing old style windows with the new thermal saving windows can lower home heating bills as well as lower oil consumption.

We all needn't suffer at the hand of OPEC. In fact, it's high time we take control of our overconsumptive ways, if only to save of futures from the cold and dark.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...conserve and recycle and all that is well and good, but you know what this side of the brain thinks? Huh?

I say we collect up all our guns and bombs and aircraft carriers and bullets and march over there to the Middle East and TAKE THEIR OIL!

Didn't we, like, save their asses from Saddam Hussein in the Membrane a decade ago? We should at least take over Iraq. Then we wouldn't have to worry about oil-for-food exchanges, keeping a fleet on smuggler interdiction missions, watching out for stray weapons of mass destruction, and we'd have a place to send all the cabdrivers we should deport for revving up their engines at stoplights and wasting all our oil, dammit!

Addicted to oil? Yeah, I'm addicted. I tie off a vein every morning and shoot up a couple dozen cc's of #10 light sweet crude and every night when I take a dump I slip off the toilet seat. Thing is, I heat my own little, drafty shack with natural gas, and no it's not the stinky gas from my butt! I drive a compact car that uses about ten gallons of fuel in an entire week, and in the summer, I ride a tiny little Kawasaki that sips gasoline by the thimbleful and stores it like a camel. I can take it to a gas station and fill the tank with the loose change I find in the couch cushions...ha ha ha! And since I got the cd player...I don't need to go out and buy records, and I never use Vaseline, so there!

You know, I'd like to see all the oil run out. Then all those tree-hugging, peace-sign wearin', anti-nuke twerps can sit in the dark hoping that the peace and love of humanity will keep out the killers trying to break into their lightless, phoneless house and steal the tofu/goat cheese salad that's going bad in the fridge, and all those spute-drivin' idiots with their uguhlee wives and screaming yard apes can sit at home in the middle of a sweltering August instead of going to the beach because gasoline costs thirth bucks a pint and they can't afford to feed the Land Rover, and all the smog can finally clear up.

Of course, all the wars over oil'll end, and all the car accidents'll cease, and all the poisons from oil refineries will dilute in the atmosphere, and we'll have to find another way to keep the population down.

But now, I gotta go get some gas, and no, I ain't gonna go eat some beans. You sicko!