Don't Waste the Outrage.

• Position: Gulf oil spill - Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By now, the initial horror of the Gulf oil spill has turned into a kind of numbed familiarity; the gusher video is like the Afghanistan body count. The political fights are mostly over second-order questions: Who will pay for the damage? Or third-order questions: Exactly how clueless are Republicans who want to apologize to BP for a shakedown? (More clueless than Tony Hayward, which is saying something.)

The biggest questions, by contrast, are still unaddressed.

For one: What does it mean that we're drilling for oil a mile beneath the surface of the sea, where we clearly can't deal with the depths and the pressures? It means that we've run out of easy places to find oil, and to merely keep the taps on, we've got to take ever-greater risks.

For another: What would have happened if that oil had made it safely ashore? It would have been refined into gas, put in the tanks of our cars, and contributed to global warming, an environmental tragedy even greater than the slick spreading out across the Gulf.

All of which leads to the real question: Do we have a hope of getting off oil, or is all the handwringing about the Gulf just ritualized politics that will fade away until the next inevitable catastrophe?

That's a tough question. Oil, coal, and natural gas lie at the absolute center of the developed world's economy. Our nation looks the way it looks because we've had access to cheap oil for more than a century: hence highways, roads, commutes, Wal-Marts, long-distance food. Hence the assumptions of our daily lives, most of which commence with the twist of a key in an ignition. Changing this in any large way will be tough.

Tough, but not impossible.

Consider, for example, Western Europe, where in the years after World War II governments were wise enough to impose and then maintain high gas taxes. As a result, the physical reality of the place looks unfamiliar (and highly attractive) to an American visitor: compact, unsprawled cities. Remarkably easy, fast, and cheap train connections. Bike-friendly downtowns. The Copenhagen climate conference last December was a disappointing fizzle, but Copenhagen itself was a triumph: Something like a third of commuters were using their bikes to get to work, even in the cold and snow, and another 40 percent were using the fast and easy subway. There was really no reason at all to have a car.

We can do something like that, too, if we ever muster the political gumption to put a high price on...