How many times, when you were little, were admonished by a parent to “turn the lights off when you leave the room!?” Turn off the television? Shut the door when the air conditioning was on?

Maybe your parents weren’t so far off.

This nation is, undoubtedly, addicted to oil. Whether as gasoline, diesel, heating oil, kerosene, motor oil, Vaseline or any other of the myriad other petroleum-based products, Americans as a nation consume 20.8 million barrels of oil per day. Of that, 13.5 million barrels – nearly 65 percent – come to us as imports from other nations around the world.

Furthermore, more than 1.4 million barrels – over 10 percent of our imported oil and nearly 7 percent of our total consumption – comes from Saudi Arabia. Another 1.1 million or so barrels originates in Venezuela, just over another million barrels from Nigeria and just over a half-million barrels from Angola. These are all nations with human rights records that are, at best, shaky. Many of them also have no problem using their oil production as a giant bargaining chip with respect to dealing with the United States.

At the current price of oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange, these import volumes result in a daily paycheck to the Saudis of around of $129 million. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, one of America’s biggest antagonists in the Western Hemisphere, makes out to the tune of $101 million per day.

What if we all, as Americans, strove to limit our consumption of oil – not for the sake of global warming, polar bears, or ice caps – but to leverage America’s situation in the world?

There are approximately 301 million people in this country today. Given the numbers cited above, that means that our average oil consumption in this country is something like $6.37 worth per person.

What if we all made a point to eliminate just one penny’s worth of oil consumption from our daily lives?

The effects immediately become obvious through simple math. $3.01 million worth of oil consumption would disappear from the American daily intake. At current price levels, that’s well over 32,000 barrels per day. Over a year’s time, we Americans could send $1.098 billion less dollars overseas.

One cent’s worth of petroleum. One measly cent. That’s four-thousandths of a gallon of crude oil at these prices. How much easier could it get? Turning off the lights when you go to bed. Setting the thermostat down one more degree in the winter, or up one more degree in the summer. Walking instead of driving.

That’s not to ignore the ecological effects of burning 32,000 less barrels of oil per day, which are no doubt considerable. But even if you’re one of those people who discount the arguments supporting global warming, who are unaffected by the smog of places like Los Angeles, or who don’t mind paying $3 for gas – the political implications of lowering oil consumption ought to be blatantly obvious.

$3.01 million dollars per day. That can buy a lot of stuff. A lot of guns. A lot of tanks. It can pay quite a few soldiers, executioners, torturers and, in the end, props up many of the despots across the planet.

In Saudi Arabia, our oil dollars support a regime that either imposes or allows draconian enforcement of a legal system from the Dark Ages, marginalizing women and dissenters almost more so than actual violent crimes. Yet we, as a consumer public, give them more than $47 billion each year.

In Venezuela, we help fund one of the most hostile governments in the Western Hemisphere, where Hugo Chavez almost weekly takes it upon himself to verbally abuse some other Central or South American nation, when he’s not taking potshots at or threatening the United States. Yet the American public gladly allows them $38.4 billion dollars each year.

In Nigeria and Angola our oil dollars help to fuel ongoing sectarian civil strife, in which thousands of innocent people have been murdered or left homeless, and many young children are pressed into military or paramilitary service. Nigeria’s American windfall is approaching $36 billion, while Angola’s haul is approaching $17 billion.

Not only do our oil dollars aid and abet these crimes, but our reliance upon these sources to fuel and stabilize our economy leaves us beholden to these same governments – a very dangerous and precarious position indeed.

Why wait for a decrease in oil production to be legislated?

Why wait for Detroit to wake up and give us fuel efficiency?

One cent. One crummy brown cent.

Do it – for America.

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in management from Orient.