Every day, we use gasoline. Estimates suggest that we use 400 million gallons of gas daily.
How much gas is used in Iraq daily?
This may stagger you:
And foreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon’s total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world’s largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems – virtually all powered by oil – the Department of Defense (DoD) is the world’s leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD’s daily oil hit, but an April report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (53 million liters) every day. This is greater than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.
Gallons-wise, that is about 18 million gallons per day.
This suggests that about 5 % of our daily gasoline budget is spent in Iraq. This does not mean that if we left Iraq, gas prices would decline 5 %. No, they probably would decline 15-20 %.
When demand stretches supply like it is right now, as the supply is cut more and more, the demand pushes up prices higher and higher. Thus, if we released an amount equivalent to 5 % of the daily supply into the US, prices would probably drop by $1/gallon.
you’re on to a factoid that can’t be mentioned in the public square…the collateral damage to world economy.
And not to be ignored….. Iraq oil, we were told, would fund the war.
The two oil men played us like a fiddle.
That’s only what we are told. We are told a lot of B.S.
The price of gasoline should be $6/gal, should have been $4/gal in 1980. Too bad, it would have shaped a much better society for all of us, public transportation in all those sprawling Southern and Western cities that grew so much since 1980. We’d have subway and rail service all over the place, solar panels everywhere, and huge farms of windmills, with trees and farms underneath, already 20 years old.
My carbon footprint is one of the lowest in the nation because I dwell in a city where I don’t need a car, and I can get around the metropolitan area with suburban commuter rail and bus links. I don’t have to, nor do I own a car, and I naturally get a lot of exercise because I have to walk a lot and climb stairs.
But my lifestyle is only replicated in what, 3 other cities in the US? Shame on us for not making gasoline expensive way back after the oil embargo of 1973, of not listening to President Carter, of listening to Milton Friedman’s “free market” capitalist rape of people, resources and nature.
Don’t kid yourself. If you eat, (buy only locally sourced food, take the rail and bus), you have a huge ‘carbon footprint’ – whatever carbon footprint means or is measured. Btw, I live in a rural hamlet of less than 1,500, no street lights…currently experiencing the wettest, coolest ‘summer months’ ever in 25 years.
Gas at $6 leaves millions unemployed (unemployment at 40% with the government printing more billions for monthly stimulus checks.
you overlook a few salient facts.
U.S. towns, cities, and industries are built around gas at US$1.50 gallon. Daily essentials are petroleum based…applies globally. But here’s the rub that will lead to resource wars..The U.S. population is 385 million – in a world of 6.5 billion – yet the U.S. uses more than 25% of world daily oil production.fostering conspicuous consumption.
An abrupt interruption of hydro carbons use without planning a viable replacement is to
shockkill the system much like patient withdrawal from a cortoid based drug that damages major organs.All well and good for those who advocate “green” and reduced carbon footprint, carbon tax (a scam for new taxes) those same people are not ready to reverse to an agro-18 century lifestyle.
Are you ready for the Great Depression, deeper than anything experienced in the 1930s?
You make it sound like we have a choice in the matter…
We don’t. And it isn’t that I am arguing that we don’t have a choice because we need to cut CO2 emissions, but that is also a good reason. It is because the cheap and easy oil has already been burned up. Now what we have is the hard to get, expensive to produce, expensive to refine oil.