Your continued use of the word "addiction" in reference to U.S. energy consumption is evidence that my response was indeed more that a "straw-man" misinterpretation of your position. Damning evidence? No. You may simply have adopted the word because so many others have. Still, I find it a very poor choice of wording in that it implies a process and solutions that can not be applied to large bodies of people in a representative form of government.

An addict is a self-aware entity capable of choice. At points in the cycle of addiction, he is well aware of his addiction and struggling with the issue of rational choice verses his irrational cravings, most often responding by going through a period of denial and then self-justification until - if he's lucky - he finally accepts the reality and begins to deal with it. A large body of people, however, represents a mass of individual choices. Here we are presented with the problem of individual verses collective decision-making: a collectively rational choice could be irrational individually, placing the individual under difficult circumstances with no real individual benefit and therefore hotly opposed by a portion of the collective body. In a representative government, that opposition could be and often is sufficient to render that option unachievable.