Our Excesses. We won't escape the excesses the Consumerist Economy has brought. No matter how our government disguises our nation's debt, how violent our society has become, how questionable our moral norms; our faith in consumerism has led to an illness in this country. We consume 18 million barrels of oil every day and that's not sustainable. There's evidence to support it's becoming more difficult to find and extract. A dramatic drop in oil would create inflation then a collapse and no politician would ever tell us that.