The first step to reducing our reliance on carbon-choking fossil fuels is realizing that we’re not reliant on them. In case you missed Elisbaeth Rosenthal’s “Life After Oil and Gas” Sunday Review piece in the New York Times, an excerpt:

“A National Research Council report released last week concluded that the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.

Just days earlier a team of Stanford engineers published a proposal showing how New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030. In fact there was so much potential power, the researchers found, that renewable power could also fuel our cars.

‘It’s absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil — we think it’s a myth,’ said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the main author of the study, published in the journal Energy Policy. ‘You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.'”