Can the people of America really change a whole way of life and give up Petroleum ...?

The answer is no. How many people are going to give up their cell phones and computers. Petroleum products are found in a vast majority of the things that are involved in our everyday life. Medicines and surgical instruments are made with petroleum products. The main thing that people are ignoring is the fact that oil is a natural product of this planet, it results from the decomposition of plants and animals, therefore it is in fact natural. And also there are bacteria that survive by eating oil that is continually leaking from the ocean floor and other places. I can take you to a creek that by the end of the summer you can skim oil off the top of the water, and there is not an oil well to found for miles, it simple rises to the top of the water naturally from the creek bed. How many people are going to stop driving their cars and start to either walk or ride a horse, because you need grease to lubricate the wheels of any wagon or anything that has wheels.

It would be the height of Stupidity to take us off Oil. For the last 35 years +, one group after another has said they have the answer, well, they don't. If there were a more efficient, less polluting, easier to obtain energy source, it would have come to the public already. They talk about Nuclear Energy, well and good but where are they going to store the spent Radio Active fuel rods? and how are we going to run the Buick on it? or the Semi Truck? or the lawn mower? The problem is Foreign Oil.

We need to use our own oil, it has been safe for years; the Environmentalists who lobbied against shallow drilling contributed to this disaster, their demand for more and more regulations is why BP was out in deep water. Bad decision? Maybe but the Obama Administration paid government workers to read the reports, do the inspections, and they still signed off on every one of their safety reports, the Obama Administration even had BP scheduled to receive a Safety Award on that very rig.

Now, is BP the only one to blame or should the Obama Administration get some blame too?

It's not now or has ever been about using less oil and global warming it's about separating Americans and there money.Emit all the carbon you want just buy credits to do it pass the cost along to the costumers.Other countries laugh at the though of forcing there people and business to pay more for energy .BHO wants us to be the first ones on a major scale to participate in this fiasco and putting another burden on the American people and business.

Beans and corn can be used for most of those products. As far as your question goes the answer is not likely. At least until the libs decide to go nuclear. Nuclear power could replace all oil and coal power plants in this country in a decade.

We're going to have to sooner or later. We can certainly lessen our dependence on oil through concentrating on developing alternative energy sources.

We can't keep fighting over oil and ruining the planet in search of it. We have to find innovative approaches to replacing it. We've been lulled into a false sense of always having enough reasonably priced oil. That and downright hostility to alternative energy sources have undermined efforts over the decades to do what we can to develop more fuel efficient mechanisms, to conserve and to seriously invest in alternatives.

To be completely fair, plastics can be made from corn. We don't need to use oil to make plastics.

So that eliminates at least half of your list.

EDIT:

I wasn't aware that corn was a scarce commodity.

Tons of corn gets wasted every year, and the Government pays some farmers not to grow any crops.

I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be some crippling corn shortage if we started making plastic from corn.

EDIT 2:

People don't starve because there is a shortage of food in the world; rather, there is an overabundance of food that gets wasted every year.

The reason people starve is because of the logistics of getting surplus corn from Nebraska to Somalia.

The only rights we have are those we can defend by force of arms.

Well sure, we'll all just go back to living in homemade log cabins and spinning our own wool and using lye soap and riding horses. That wouldn't destroy society at all.

The people of America might be able to but the real question is, will the big oil companies let them?

I'm assuming you're basing this question on the liberals who want to switch to alternative fuels. All I can say is that government shouldn't subsidize "green" technologies and punish the fossil fuel industry. It should be left to the private sector to make that decision to make a switch.