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Aside from the article's well-placed thoughts, politicians had better start realizing that petroleum is at this point far too precious to burn. Air pollution and global climate change aside (and those are huge asides), the modern world arguably has depended on oil not just for cheap energy but for all manner of petrochemicals, some of them vital to our current level of technology.
The plastics industry, for example, could still survive up to a point by making corn-based alternatives (assuming the corn itself isn't being turned into expensive fuel). But there are some non-burn uses of petroleum products that are at this point impossible or impossibly expensive to replace. We can conserve, we can recycle and we can be a lot more careful about how we use these chemicals, but it's hard to imagine our current technology surviving without some of these products. So burning up what's left of the world's oil reserves is doubly foolish.
