Alright, I felt that I simply had to respond to this thread.

Yes, Americans use more energy per capita than every other country in the world. Go figure that Australia is second. I'm not condoning this, I am simply going to state my theory as to WHY this occurs.

In America, especially Texas, it's possible to travel four HUNDRED miles in a direction and only encounter two or three towns. American Cities are HUGE. The city of Los Angeles and all the other 'sub-cities' that built up around it probably cover a circle 40 miles in diameter. That is just less than 1500 square miles, which is bigger than many European nations.

In most of Europe, cities or towns are about 20 to 30 miles apart and that's in a BIG Euproean country. As Europe is so much older than the U.S. I suspect that the farthest a town will be is a day's ride from any other town.

In countries like Russia, Brazil, and China, people don't own cars because 1) the economy is such that few can afford one and has been for decades and 2) A lot of the country is virtually uninhabited.

Combine the size factor with the American comfort factor which requires considerable more space than Europeans or Asians and you get that everybody has cars because everybody NEEDS cars. True, it is a perceived need, but a need nonetheless.

Second. Most of the energy wasted in the U.S. is done in old fashioned coal power plants. Why? Two reasons. 1) Because we have coal and oil to burn and 2) because, unlike almost every other country in the world, most power generation stations are privately owned. In European countries, the state owns all the power plants and so can actually regulate them effectively. Here, the power plants are owned by mega-corporations who have virtually unlimited resourses to make sure that things go the way they want them to. Already, every river that can be dammed, without flooding out a major city, in the U.S. has been.

So, why hasn't the U.S. switched to comparativly clean Nuclear power? Because the mega-corporations decide that it's too expensive to do so and if they do, then the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission now has some leverage.

So, it boils down to distance, which nobody can do anything about, and money which would take a concerted effort by too many people with too many different goals to do much good.