Scientific American Blogs – Observations: Can we get off oil now?

To be clear, the goal is to break U.S. addiction to oil, not just foreign oil. Oil prices are global, and as Woolsey points out, the U.S. has no domestic leverage. Greatly increasing our own offshore oil drilling could lower imports a little, but it won’t lower world prices; it is too easy for OPEC to manipulate production to offset the effects of any new U.S. supply.

The payoff of significantly reducing oil consumption would reach far beyond the economy and the environment, by the way. A study by Boyden Gray and Andrew Varcoe noted that oil companies are permitted under a waiver of the Clean Air Act to include known carcinogens such as benzene, toluene and xylene in gasoline, which raise octane (power output). The study showed that the added cost to healthcare and shortened lives in the U.S. comes to more than $100 billion a year.

The U.S. can take a number of steps to reduce oil consumption and to create liquid fuels that can substitute for oil.

via Scientific American Blogs – Observations: Can we get off oil now?. The argument of drill here, drill now, doesn’t really mean much.