The absence of a sound, coherent and comprehensive energy policy demonstrates the affluent society's overconsumption and waste and its love affair with oversized vehicles.

The sports utility vehicle, better known as the SUV, should be called SUG for suck-up-gas. Whenever I see the SUVs cruising through town, I cringe. What a waste!

If anyone wonders where the dinosaurs have gone, they travel the streets and highways of overindulgent America -- vehicular behemoths, the extravagant autos, the gas guzzlers.

Will this madness ever end? I doubt it. Perhaps if we are faced with calamitous events, then we may be forced to change our excessive ways.

The global energy crisis (and it is a crisis) is beginning to resemble a doomsday scenario -- a future apocalypse? Shall we continue to give lip service to fuel economy and conservation and alternative sources of energy?

Cornelius W. Purvis II