You may have noticed that the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana shoreline are in the process of turning black. You may have noticed that tens of thousands of people have died over the past few years in a Middle Eastern war whose initial motivations had at least something to do with US dependence on foreign oil. You may have seen that the US is often obliged to make special concessions to oil-rich states (one in particular springs to mind) that, shall we say, do not share all of our core moral values. The root cause for all these things can be traced back to the fact that we are deeply, helplessly dependent on oil.

I live in a pedestrian-friendly city with a functioning public transport system, which allows me to live without a car. As a result, my immediate, personal demand for gasoline may be smaller than that of many Americans. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t leave metaphorical oily footprints wherever I go. For a start, everything I consume has to be trucked to me. And then there’s the question of what exactly I am consuming.

My delivery sushi lunch today arrived in a bag (plastic). The sushi rolls were delivered in a tray (plastic) with a clear top (plastic). The wasabi and the ginger came in little tubs (plastic). The salad came in another tray (plastic) with a lid (plastic). So did the ginger sauce for the salad. There was also a tub (plastic) of soup, and a ziploc bag (plastic) of utensils, including a spoon (plastic) and a handful of plastic sachets of soy sauce. Non-oil-derived products included a paper napkin, a paper menu, wooden chopsticks, and a little foil tray for my soy sauce.

Now that I’m done eating, all that stuff is going straight into the trash. It will be picked up, driven away, and dumped in a landfill somewhere, where it will simply sit, failing to degrade. These things we have made persist long, long after we cease to have any use for them. If the remains of my lunch escape the incinerator, they’ll be around - still in the same recognizable shape - long after every trace of me has vanished from this planet, taking up useful land and constituting a problem for someone else to deal with further down the line.

This is what makes our national dependence on oil so insane. The oil that we’re so profoundly addicted to, which warps our thinking and blackens our coastlines, is used to make things that we don’t want. Using oil and energy to make things that we want and use is one thing; using them to create stuff that we throw away the second we’re done with it is something else again.

It’s generally assumed that American consumers will violently resist any attempt to interfere with their fossil-fuel-hungry lifestyle (the way of life that Dick Cheney arrogantly declared to be ‘not negotiable’). A dictator who tapped everyone’s phones and sent the secret police to break down a few selected doors at dawn would inspire mild grumbling at best. Let him try to force everyone to ride bicycles or do without that third widescreen TV and there’d be a popular insurrection in less time than you can say “The right of the people to consume hydrocarbons shall not be infringed.” Any politician who raises the taxes on gasoline does so at his peril.

But how hard would it be to persuade Americans - and by extension, everybody else in an increasingly consumerist world - to give up the stuff that they don’t actually want in the first place? All that disposable packaging; the air conditioning in malls and offices that chills you to the bone instead of keeping you comfortable (it’s 84F outside and I’m wearing a fleece); all the food that gets trucked or flown across thousands of miles only to be thrown away or stuffed into the bellies of people who already take in so many excess calories that they have to spend hours each week burning them off at the gym.

Despite our best collective efforts to resist the knowledge, it’s becoming harder to deny the mounting evidence that we are in the process of destroying our own environment. A planet is a big thing and life is extraordinarily resilient, but we now have the capacity to fuck things up so badly that even our own survival as a species may be called into question. Sooner or later, we have to face up to that and take some kind of action.

So here’s a modest proposal: if telling people that they can’t have the things they want is politically unthinkable, maybe we should explore the possibility of telling them that they can’t have the things they don’t want?