Event Report: Overcoming Our Addiction to Oil 

     Overcoming Oil Addiction to Prevent Climate Change by Steven Suranovic, Associate Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University, brought together research from psychology and economics to compare our lack of action to address climate change to that of substance abuse and addiction. His work uses an addiction model from behavioral economics to give insight to our oil use and our addressing of climate change. His model on oil addiction is derived from a model on addiction to cigarettes. For example, the cigarette model includes the present effects, such as nicotine stimulant and social benefits, the future effects such as earlier death and cancer, and adjustment costs, such as withdrawal effects and habit change. He changes these variables in the oil addiction model to include cheaper transportation as an example of present effects, global climate change and floods as examples of future effects, and costlier transportation as an example of adjustments costs.
    This model suggested that two conditions must be met in order for an individual to break their addiction to oil. First, the future costs and their likelihood of occurrence must outweigh the current benefits. Second, the future benefit must be greater than the adjustment costs that are accrued when making the transition away from fossil fuels.
According to Dr. Suranovic, breaking our addiction to oil will be hard for individuals because of individual changes cause virtually no change in the amount carbon in the atmosphere. In addition, people may not even be alive long enough to see the negative effects of climate change.
    Dr. Suranovic had a rather bleak outlook on the possibility of any change in our addiction to oil. He noted that even though cigarette addiction is a much simpler problem compared to oil addition, with the effects of cigarette addiction being much more certain and being felt by the decision maker. Despite being a more simplistic problem, many people continue to smoke, leaving little hope of breaking our addiction to oil.