Daniel Day Lewis just won an Oscar for his performance the embodiment of greed in There Will Be Blood. His character, Daniel Plainview, is a ruthless, scheming, tooth sucking, over-the-top wanna-be oil tycoon who kills to turn the dry hills of California into his personal bank account. He is exactly the kind of greedy oil baron Americans have loved to hate since John D. Rockefeller first landed in the Pennsylvania oil fields in the 1860’s. Everyone who sees the movie leaves the theatre convinced that what'’s wrong with us is greed, and oil is a metaphor for that.

I loved this movie (particularly the way it shows crude oil rocketing out of the ground) but I don’t think greed is the problem— -- it’'s the answer.

American voters and politicians buy into the greed and oil myth, but with a twist: We'’re happiest when we’re condemning the greed and taking the oil. Everyone from Pelosi to Huckabee has trotted out the “"G-word"” when discussing high gas prices. (In 2006, Bush coyly referred to “illegal manipulation or cheating.) But I think the tycoon story is pretty much dead. If we’'re going to deal with the current problems of oil— -- high prices, smog, greenhouse gases, geopolitical problems, traffic jams -- we’re going to need to ditch the oil and embrace the greed.

The reason we'’re so dependent upon oil is that it was such a natural fit for greed. It was greed that motivated wildcatters like Plainview to go prospecting for oil when nine holes out of ten yielded nothing. Greed built the pipelines, refineries, and corner gas stations, and even the highways that make us creatures of oil. (One of the big promoters of the first cross-country highway was a man who hoped to sell more auto headlamps. Boy did he ever!)

Recently I was researching a gas station near my house and found it was built by a brand produced by a refinery built in Avon California. Why was the refinery there? In 1901 a man named W. S. Porter wanted to sell a lot of pipe, so he convinced a group of Southern California oil producers to form a company, build a refinery in the North, and buy his pipe to connect the two. What I love about this story is how dumbly powerful greed is at building infrastructure.

To build a new, reduced carbon infrastructure we'll need to start by re-engineering greed into something more green, call it greendy. We’'ll need policies that don'’t give the advantage to the dirty greed (ie grandfathered coal plants and Hummers) but to the greendy (distributed generation of recycled waste for power, for example, or biogas from farm manure, or hydraulic hybrid trucks.) If policies make green and greed align, then the Daniel Plainviews and Rockefellers will start trying to sell pipe. Anyway, I'’d love to see Hollywood make a movie about a ruthless solar entrepreneur.