"But avoiding fuel purchase is impossible. Even if I ride the bus, I've bought fuel. If I buy anything that has been transported, I have purchased fuel. If I heat my house or turn on a light bulb, I have purchased fuel. So while there are viable alternatives to the strawmen examples the free marketeers push, there are no viable alternatives to our oil addiction."
How additionally wrong you are.
1. Buy more things made and produced locally - road side produce stand instead of the super market, local store instead of the catalogue or the Internet, "local" entertainment instead of a four hour car trip or a weekend plane trip - and you will reduce your fuel consumption and/or fuel costs. You have choices.
2. Reduce the number of trips you take. Do more "drive buy" shopping by picking up things as you go to and from work instead of making everything a separate shopping trip. Eliminate those very wasteful last-minute, gotta-have-it one-item-purchase trips. Nothing is that important.Walk to the neighborhood mini-mart around the corner for your 11:Pm Hagen Das fix.
3. But "riding a bus" is more fuel efficient than taking a car, when you measure the fuel in passenger-miles achieved by the same gallon of fuel.
4. Turn lights off when not at home. Buy "pilot-less" gas water-heaters and kitchen ranges - they don't waste gas when they are not being used. Spend a little more and install water-heaters that produce all the hot water you want, on demand, without running 24/7 to keep a tank of water hot. Cost more to buy, saves tons of cost and fuel in the long run.
So, every way noted above CAN reduce the EXTENT of YOUR oil addiction.
However, don't lose sight of this fact. As you reduce your "fuel consumption" because the price is high, you will in time bring down that price, and therefore you will continue to use that "fuel" when your conservation efforts help keep the price of that fuel reasonable.
And, conversely, if you allow your useage to remain as it is and the current "fuel" prices do not decline, you will help to insure that someone will bring out more alternatives to the "fuel" you are consuming, because the high prices will make the profitability of those alternatives more likely.
Either way, we have and we do make the choices that result in what is available to us.
You can reduce the extent of fuel purchase, but you cannot avoid buying fuel. I can avoid buying coffee. Therefore, the coffee argument is a strawman. How wrong I'm not.