Scholar to give talk on curbing U.S. oil addiction

Americans spend $800 million a day on 20 million barrels of oil, but a leading scholar says there are ways to break that habit.

Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute, an independent environmental-research organization, is scheduled to speak this evening to the Santa Fe Council on International Relations about “American Energy: Breaking Our Addiction to Oil.”

Flavin recently wrote in World Watch magazine that “the current path — continually expanding our use of oil on the assumption that the earth will yield whatever quantity we need — is irresponsible and reckless.”

The institute recently published an article devoted to peak oil, which is the theory that oil production has already hit its maximum output, or will soon. After that point, the world’s remaining oil supply would drop sharply, proponents say.

The New Mexican