Politics & Power Quote by Sherwood Boehlert

Sixty percent. Forty-five percent. Boehlert isn’t trying to sound poetic; he’s trying to corner you with arithmetic. The line works because it takes a sprawling, emotionally charged topic - oil, dependence, national security, climate - and pins it to the most ordinary American ritual: getting in the car. Instead of talking about “energy policy” as some distant Washington abstraction, he makes transportation the smoking gun, and passenger vehicles the trigger.

The intent is diagnostic and political. By isolating where oil actually goes, Boehlert is quietly telling lawmakers and voters where leverage lives. If most oil is burned on roads, then drilling debates, refinery talking points, and even home-energy fixes are partial solutions at best. The subtext: real reduction requires touching the third rail of American life - driving habits, vehicle standards, land use, and the auto industry’s power. That’s a harder fight than applauding new supply.

Context matters, too. Boehlert came up in an era when fuel economy, suburban sprawl, and imported oil were already baked into the economy, and when “energy independence” rhetoric often floated free of specifics. His percentages are a corrective to that vagueness. They also anticipate the politics of blame: if the problem sits in millions of private driveways, responsibility can’t be outsourced to a single villain. It’s a structural critique disguised as a simple fact, the kind of sentence designed to make policy feel unavoidable.