Rethinking the Root of the Problem

The United States really needs to embrace a policy of frugality and foresight and abandon its current blind opulence and extravagance regarding resource usage.

A graph from this page in Architecture2030 seems to reflect the United States' callous abuse of resources:
*edit* From a tip from a colleague, I realized I had not explained what the elements of the graph meant. So here goes..

The main graph body (bar graph) shows how much energy each nation uses annually. The blue bar is energy use as of year 2000, and the pink bar is projections for year 2020 based on current trends.

The smaller inset graph shows how much US energy usage has grown over the decades.

The real problem the United States has with sustainable living is that its attitude toward resources refuses to accomodate it. The United States' attitude toward money is "spend, don't save!" Of course this is an oversimplified economic view, but conventional wisdom seems to reflect it. America is truly blessed ... with unlimited resources. Just contrast a neighborhood grocery store with the food and water shortages many other regions face as the cold bleak reality of daily life...

However, energy and the planet are not some sort of unlimited assembly-line commodity sold to the highest bidder. The supply of fossil fuels could care less how many truckloads of cash oil companies dump into new oil wells. It will run out regardless. Some might argue that biofuels can dig us out of this grave, but even biofuels require tremendous amounts of land and water to quench the thirst for fuel. So yes, there is a balance to consider somewhere in all this.