The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
With gas prices nationally, and especially in our area, increasingly on the rise, it is more crucial then ever that we take steps to diversify our energy sources and reduce our dependency on foreign oil.
We are considering various ways of making use of our oil and gas downstream industries. This is to be complemented with the import of oil and gas from other sources as raw materials.
First, we should not be opening our coasts, all of our coasts, to oil drilling when we have not taken the first step, not the first step, to conserve oil.
Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.
I don't see a groundswell of people willing to raise gas taxes right now. That leaves fuel economy standards as the only effective tool we have as a nation to make a dent in our dangerous and ever growing consumption of oil.
So we in Congress have a very clear choice. We can take largely symbolic action and sit back and fiddle while Americans burn more gasoline. Or we can pass concrete, effective legislation that will save consumers money while significantly reducing U.S. oil consumption.
Our oil problems are only going to get worse. Our trade balance is only going to get worse. So we have to slow the growth of U.S. oil consumption, particularly imported oil consumption.
The U.S. uses most of its oil for transportation. We can limit U.S. demand for oil by requiring automakers to use the technology that already exists to improve fuel economy - technology that the automakers refuse to bring into the market despite societal demand.
We need to reduce or at least limit U.S. demand for oil as quickly as possible, and we need to develop new technologies that can further help address our addiction to oil in the future.
Well, for starters, we have to do more to create demand for new technologies that can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and environmental degradation.
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
