Damek.

So there’s a lot of political posturing going around with this whole gas price issue. My fear is that those of us who view America’s oil dependence as an engineering problem will be drowned out by the shouting of those who insist on making it a moral issue. (This comes from both sides.)

See, I look at current American society and I see a lot of progress, buoyed by great advances in technology — humanity reaching to understand itself, the universe, and attempting wherever possible to solve the problems it confronts. Certainly there are exceptions, and some solutions later turn out to be problematic. We have a drive for ever greater control of our surroundings, with the intention of freeing ourselves from arbitrary constraints of nature. This goes back deep into our prehistory, when the first early hominids decided they wanted to check out that territory to the north and discovered they need to get some heavier clothing to survive there.

So I’m a great lover of technology — but I have one greater love, and that is efficient technology. For example, you can heat your whole home, or you can put on a sweater. One is new technology, one is very old. In my view, the most efficient is the better technology. Of course there may be instances where heating your whole home is the better choice to make, but it’s a matter of choosing the right tool for the job at hand — you shouldn’t use a hammer to put in a screw, and you shouldn’t use a butcher knife to skin a tomato.

I’m not averse to human society cocooning itself in a haze of energy-sucking machines making everyone’s lives easier. So let’s say we do that, as we have been doing: we build an ever-expanding array of technology, lifting humanity to the next level. Sounds good to me, in theory.

Unfortunately, if the energy base you build that on is unsustainable, the whole thing is going to come crashing down eventually. You don’t start building your new home on an unstable marshland if you can avoid it, and if you only discover the problem after you’re well onto building your third expansion, you don’t go ahead anyway because you’ll be compounding the problem. Sure, you’ll probably be able to engineer a solution, but it’s inexcusable to bullheadedly keep adding to the problem your eventual solution is supposed to solve.

This is the issue I take with those who would say “the market will handle it.” Sure, alternative energy sources are being developed, and as oil gets too expensive people will shift to using them. But in the meantime, the costs of shifting and cleaning up the mess just keep getting greater and greater. We knew we had an oil addiction decades ago. President Carter courageously faced the American people and gave a message of conservation, of a new direction — and he was summarily stabbed in the back by his oil junkie country.

Of course, there is a moral aspect to this larger problem of civilization engineering. Simply put, not only is the oil supply on which we’ve based our technological boom society going to run out eventually, not only is it changing the climate, but there are other people living on this planet with us. We have ruined their climate, too, not to mention causing war and destruction in the name of our addiction. But I view those moral downsides to oil as part of the larger engineering problem, exasperating the situation even more.

So here we are with a great society, going wonderful places, and the foundations are showing signs of crumbling. And what do the Republicans want to do? Give you $100 so they can go drill the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. Apparently we need a buffer, so we have more time to shift our foundations. They ignore that this will only continue to make the underlying problem worse. When you discover your house is built on marshland, you cease or slow construction of any expansions until you get the fundamentals fixed. There is no savior technology coming down the pike to save us at the last minue, and using more oil will only continue our bad habits and add even more carbon to the atmosphere.

We need to slow now. Who will courageously call for conservation?

The closest we’ve come so far is when Democrats orchestrated a mini-filibuster in the Senate yesterday, with Senator Wyden from Oregon calling for an end to a Federal handout to oil companies drilling on federal land. Small pickin’s, but something Congress has talked about for years. Republicans would not allow a vote.

Ideally, I think Democrats are wrong to ask for even a temporary reduction in gas taxes for consumers, for reasons argued in The Oil Drum’s recent press release. Practically, we need the Democrats back in control of congress, and until they are, there’s little they can do anyway, so I’m persuaded by Matt Yglesias and Atrios that this kind of political theater is a welcome, encouraging thing to see.

I just hope that, in the months and years to come, the discourse on oil really does change, and we begin to confront our dependence practically and scientifically.