Kicking Our Oil Habit: Beyond Cars

Bradford Plumer searches for low-hanging fruit:

As it turns out, passenger travelplanes and cars, mainlyonly accounts for 47 percent of our oil use. This is probably the hardest item to fix in the short run, and requires a very wide array of different policies...There's a lot of other oil use out there that may be easier to tackle in the short run. About eight million buildings, mostly in the Northeast, use oil for heating, and this accounts for about 15 percent of the country's crude consumption. Upgrading these buildings so that they get their heat from natural gas or electricity would be a worthwhile endeavor. Likewise, there's no good reason why we should still be burning oil to generate electricity during peak-demand timessmarter grids or even solar power could help whittle that down.