A good fight can be fun, particularly when you truly believe in your soul that you are not just right and correct, but just. 

Which is why I so often take the bait when I should be working. This morning I saw a tweet from Jane Van Ryan, who is the Senior Communications Manager and New Media Advisor for the American Petroleum Institute. 

So every once in a while she tweets about how people just love offshore drilling. Like today when she that a majority of voters support offshore drilling. 

In her link she brings up a USA Today editorial that claims "that limiting or banning offshore drilling would deny our nation access to 40-60 billion barrels of recoverable oil -- about six to eight years at current U.S. consumption". 

I immediately went on over to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's website to verify these claims, ready to blog away about the ridiculousness of it. 

Then I realized, 'they got me'. 

They got me because they (Ms. Van Ryan, the USA Today, and API) were able to make the discussion about whether to drill for oil or not, with the assumption that we ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE THE STUFF. 

And there's the fallacy of getting into this fight in the first place. We need to break free from oil, not simply figure out how to move the problem around. 

And here's an interesting statistic. For the last three years we have data for (2006-2008), oil consumption is going down in the United States, hitting a 30 year low in 2008 as measured in per capita usage. 

So the overall amount of oil being used has decreased, but so has the per capita use. Between 2007 and 2008, the amount of oil consumed dropped 5.46%, and the per capita use dropped to 23.49 barrels per person -- lowest in the the thirty years I could find data for. It's only the second time we've dipped under 24 barrels/person/year since 1983, the other being 1983. 

My belief then is that the oil industry is pulling out all stops to get all the oil possible. You see, as oil gets harder to get at, the prices go up and the population -- already in the midst of a recession -- begins to conserve. 

Now, I wish it were out of a sense of green loyalty, and sure some of it may be, but it's largely driven by pocketbooks. 

So if BP and ExxonMobil and the others can get more oil, they can more of it into the market, bringing down the price, et voila, oil use rises again. 

Don't ever forget that oil is a drug, the oil industry is the pusher, and the U.S. is a whacked out junkie. We need to get off the junk, not just find a cheaper supplier, if we're ever going to get clean.