Well as has been pointed out before, Oil is a very valuable source of all sorts of raw materials used for all sorts of industrial and consumer products (like raw materials for plastics, dyes & paints to name a few), that are not easy to get from other sources currently.

If you take more oil from the ground to burn it in your SUV, then you have "wasted" more of our collective resource of valuable petrochemical feedstock - whether that oil comes from US reserves or some terrorist run oil well in the Middle East has little bearing on the matter.

So, yes not wasting valuable oil is important to us all. And its especially to not waste the high quality oils that we use to run our cars on as these have the compounds in them that are most valuable and they are a finite resource.
Oil is pretty much like coal, it comes in varying quality and the best quality coals are very valuable and are in short supply, relative to the vast quantities of lower quality (and sulphur laden) coal out there.

Yes, the pollution from a SUV is currently a major problem and so is using oil to run inefficient petrol engines - regardless of the levels of pollution emitted from doing so.

When hybrid and fuel cell cars and power sources are available, they will be able to extract far more of the energy directly out of the oil than the current big banger air-breathing internal combustion engine in your SUV does now.

And it will do this while reducing pollution and wastage.

So by not wasting the oil now we:

(a) keep a valuable and scarce resource in reserve

(b) don't have to deal with the pollutants that burning it would generate - and dealing with those pollutants takes more energy again.

and

(c) and your country is less likely to be held to ransom by future Oil Shocks.

And eventually when we collectively don't need oil, we can chose whether or not to let the factions in the Middle East fight it out "to the death" in the deserts of the Middle East without having to care much one way or the other about the outcome.