How to do that is where they may disagree.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush said the best way to beat our "addiction" to oil is "by applying the talent and technology of America." He promised to spend more on clean-energy research, with the goal of replacing more than 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. He mentioned solar and wind technologies that could power homes and offices, better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol from wood chips and switchgrass. All this was good news, but what was missing was an effort to involve the American people in this revolution. After all, we are the ones collectively creating the problem — and the ones with the power to change things.

I’m no politician, and I don’t claim to be an expert on energy or automobiles. I’m just an average American taxpayer wondering how we got to this place: a world with wider parking spaces and plane seats to accommodate oversized people and their supersized SUVs; a world where high fuel prices are driving up the cost of everything from groceries to cable rates; a world where Exxon Mobil Corp. posts record profits while Ford Motor Co. announces massive layoffs.

Something is wrong here, and it’s time to do something about it. In the interest of national security, economic prosperity and the future of our planet, we have to change our ways. Putting a huge tax on gas is not the solution. It would hurt the people who are already struggling to make ends meet, and the rest would continue driving SUVs and luxury cars. This is America: We can’t tell people what to drive, how many cars they can own or how much gas they should use. But we can offer incentives for innovation and conservation, and we can force those who use the most fuel to pay a price for the luxury.

With those goals in mind, I’ve created a 12-step program for beating our addiction:

1. Offer a tax credit for people who carpool or take mass transit to work.

2. Increase current tax credits for people who buy vehicles that use alternative fuel sources.

3. Increase corporate minimum fuel efficiency levels (the average mpg required for an auto manufacturer’s fleet of cars, SUVs and trucks) so that sales of energy-efficient vehicles more than balance out sales of guzzlers.

4. Add a small "guzzler tax" to the registration fees for all vehicles that average fewer than 20 miles per gallon, and put the money toward developing alternative fuel sources.

5. Add a similar tax to registration fees for recreational vehicles such as motorboats, snowmobiles and ATVs, and put the money toward developing alternative fuel sources.

6. Forget about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Environmental concerns aside, the oil harvested will not provide a long-term solution. Instead of wasting time and money on a temporary fix, let’s work toward developing clean, renewable energy sources.

7. Offer more tax breaks, low-interest loans and other financial incentives for automakers to develop better cars that run on alternative fuel sources. Where’s our American competitive spirit? Let’s do Henry Ford proud and beat Toyota.

8. Launch a public education campaign on the benefits of conservation. Maybe if people realized how easy it is to save a gallon of gas each week — and understood the collective difference that savings could make — they’d make more of an effort to conserve.

9. Do real-world testing (run the air conditioning, for example) when determining fuel efficiency figures, and change the stickers on new cars to better reflect the mpg they actually get.

10. Test fuel economy during annual vehicle inspections by looking for things such as soft tires.

11. Harness American ingenuity by holding a competition to develop a vehicle that runs on cheap, clean, renewable fuel. Yes, the automakers are working on this, but why not get some entrepreneurs involved? They rose to the $10 million challenge with Space Ship One, the first privately built craft to soar into space, and they will do so again.

12. Last but not least, we must make energy a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. America needs a president who will stand up to the oil companies and lead the way toward change, or, at the very least, give us a better drug with which to fuel our addiction.

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Lisa Miller is a freelance writer who lives in Oneonta. She can be reached at lisamiller44@hotmail.com.