Barrels of Addiction

"Water of Life."

The Gaelic translation of this phrase is Uisce Beatha, or in English, whiskey. Whiskey may be Scotland's water of life, but the rest of the planet has come to know a much more troublesome, equally taxed and much more severely addicting source of vitality: oil.

And oil is ruining modern civilization.

Last Friday was Earth Day, an appropriate time to reflect on how the Western world's devastation of the environment is, according to Britain's chief scientific officer Sir David King, many times more dangerous than terrorism.

America's dependency on oil is absolutely more dangerous than a battalion of RPG wielding, Al-Qaeda trained terrorists.

It seems so obvious that the solution to the Middle Eastern problem and the world's ecological impending disaster is to eliminate our rabid addiction to oil.

The list goes far beyond gas prices. But that's a good place to start.

Last week, gas was about $1.76 a gallon nationwide - a little higher than that in Western New York and over $2.00 a gallon in some parts of California - an increase of about 20 cents since last year.

But while Californian activist groups like Citizens Against High Gas Prices are using horse-drawn buggies in Los Angeles to protest soaring fuel costs, Europeans are coping with prices several dollars per gallon higher.

The average price of gasoline in Britain last week was $5.38 a gallon; a bargain compared with the Netherlands, where it was $5.69 a gallon. In Germany it was $5.01. The French got away with paying $4.78.

The reason, of course, is taxes. A bottle of nice scotch whiskey is cheaper in Buffalo than it is in Edinburgh because of outrageous taxes. The same applies to a gallon of gasoline. Without taxes, a gallon of fuel would be cheaper than a gallon of Dasani water.

Europeans have adapted to sky-high gas prices by changing their transportation habits. They buy cars like the Smart car, which is essentially a highly evolved golf cart that gets about 60 miles per gallon. Their public transportation systems, although overcrowded and sometimes unreliable, are still many times better than any system anywhere in the United States, save the New York City subway system.

And those that insist on driving in Europe are contributing heavily to improvements in public transportation.

"The only way to get people out of their cars is to price them out, and take the money from that and beef up public transportation," writes Adam McCarthy, manager for transport mobility for the International Automobile Federation in Brussels, Belgium.

According to the European Union, about $357 billion was collected on taxes and road-use fees in Western Europe in 2001. Of that, about $86 billion was pumped right back into public transportation systems.

Can you imagine the city of Buffalo spending 25 percent of its tolls and local gas taxes to improve the Metro system - one of the laughing stocks of the city? I'm almost embarrassed to say that I have lived in Buffalo all my life and the only thing I know about public transportation here is that Billy Fuccillo must have paid a "huge" amount of money to have his mural painted on the side of Metro's fleet of buses.

Europeans reducing their gas consumption is a great start to solving the oil dependency problem, but there is still a long way to go.

The United States' Energy Information Administration estimated that demand for gasoline this summer would average a record high 9.32 million barrels a day.

For real change to occur in this country, the culture has to change. The United States is the world's poster child for oil dependency and it needs a leader who is committed to changing that (not like our current president from Texas, the birthplace of the oil industry).

Andrew Tylecote, an economics professor at Sheffield University in England, is one man the government should pay attention to. He has a plan that could help the United States give alternative energy sources large amounts of government money and adventurous capitalists will follow if the incentives are right.

Tylecote says governments need to take the lead in putting money into renewable energy like solar, wind and hydropower, and completely disinvest in nuclear energy, something he calls a "black hole."

It can work. It is already starting to work in England and Japan, where the technology for more fuel-efficient car engines is a profitable industry because the demand is there and the government is helping.

It worked in Denmark where the government tilted the tax scale so it was profitable to invest in wind power.

Right now there is no incentive for Ford to make a car less reliant on oil, and the government needs to change that. Reducing the use of oil can almost definitely save the planet, and if it can happen in America, where we thirst for oil more than a Scotsman thirsts for whiskey, it can happen anywhere.