According to a lot of patriotic rhetoric, if the United States stands for one value, that value is personal freedom. We don't like to be told how to live our lives, thank you very much. We'll do what we think is right, even if it does fly in the face of common sense. How else can you explain Hammer pants, gauged ears big enough to fit soup bowls, or worse, large SUVs that devour scarce resources?
Legally speaking, we've made sure that this will be the case for a while, in spite of recent presidential moves to allow spying on our own citizens.
Unfortunately, our preference for our right to do whatever we want, when we want, sometimes crosses the fine line between empowered individuality and spoiled bratty-ness.
Most recently, this line was crossed when at some point in the past few decades we decided that we had the right to drive the biggest, most fuel-inefficient vehicles we wanted, rationalizing our gargantuan SUVs as necessary accompaniment for our travels through the most dangerous jungle of them all - the suburban jungle.
The real economic and political hazard of our dependency on oil was even recognized by President Bush in his State of the Union address when he said that we needed to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.
Bush's acknowledgement was a half step in the right direction. The problem isn't just a dependency on foreign oil - the problem is our dependency on oil, period.
In her speech in Murdock Hall on Saturday, Gov. Janet Napolitano was asked a question about alternative energy. She pointed out President Bush's latest budget proposal, which does little to offer incentives for the development of alternative energy sources.
This is especially disheartening when we live in Arizona - a state that seems like it was basically geographically constructed to be used for solar and wind energy.
Vice President Dick Cheney has said that a green lifestyle is a "personal decision," as if to justify the administration's lack of support for alternatives to oil. Well, duh. What isn't a personal decision?
The question isn't whether or not using alternative energies is a lifestyle. The question is, when is the government going to realistically acknowledge the issue?
And when will we reward companies that support this "personal decision," like we reward other companies, with tax incentives?
Moves toward energy efficiency and alternative energy can no longer be written off as pipe dreams when one looks at two examples. In our own country, one needs look no further than California.
Because California is one of the few states that bothers to update its building codes and energy efficiency requirements as time goes on, Californians use less energy per capita than almost any other state.
In addition, in response to the big energy shortage crisis a few years ago, the Californian government initiated an aggressive supply-side reduction campaign, which had a big impact on how much energy people used.
In Brazil, a majority of cars are able to run on fuel that is 25 percent ethanol, or alcohol made from biomass. A significant portion can also run on pure ethanol, which is available at many of the country's gas stations.
So, are Brazil's car companies run by tree-hugging hippies? Hardly. Brazil doesn't have a major domestic car manufacturer - they're almost exclusively the same foreign cars we buy, but made with engines that can handle different fuels.
And now that we have a president who is talking the talk, along with examples of political units walking the walk, we have no reason not to act.
Ben is a journalism junior. Reach him at benjamin.horowitz@asu.edu.
