9,236 gallons of oil

I recently visited the website of Rocky Mountain Institute, where I learned that the United States consumes nearly 19 million barrels of oil per day. That sounds like a lot of oil, but how can I put it into a number that I can understand? Consider, that there are 42 gallons per barrel. I decided to calculate how many gallons American consume each second. The answer? Americans consume 9,236 gallons of oil each second. Consider that an Olympic sized swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons. Thus, Americans use oil at such a high rate that we could almost fill up an Olympic sized swimming pool every minute, day and night, 365 days a year. Much of that oil is burned for transportation. What can we do in the transportation sector to use oil more efficiently? As individuals, we can use less by walking, biking, using public transportation, carpooling, combining trips and making sure that your engine is tuned and your tires are fully inflated. No Impact Man Colin Beavan offers a free manual full of ideas (register here). Here are 365 more suggestions. RMI suggests an additional way to cut back our use of oil: by using "feebates."

The basic idea of a feebate is simple. Buyers of inefficient vehicles are levied a surcharge (the “fee”), while buyers of efficient vehicles are awarded a rebate (the “bate”). By affecting the purchase cost up front, feebates speed the production and adoption of more efficient vehicles, saving oil, insecurity, cost, and carbon.

One form of a feebate program has been in use in France, where vehicles now have the lowest carbon emissions in the European Union. To read more about feebates, see "Feebates: A Key to Breaking U.S. Oil Addiction."

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How to get from here to there regarding renewable energy

According to a recent article by Richard Kerr in the August 13, 2010 issue of Science ("Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition?") it's going to be extremely difficult to move the world away from power-packed fossil fuels to more diffuse and less useful renewable energy:

Never has the world so self-consciously tried to move toward new sources of energy. But the history of past major energy transitions-from wood to coal, and from coal to oil and gas-suggests that it will be a long, tough road to scaling up alternatives to fossil fuels that don't stoke greenhouse warming. The big problem is that, for the first time, the world is moving to tap new energy sources that are, in many ways, less useful and convenient than the currently dominant sources: fossil fuels.

[For instance] oil is densely packed with energy, easily transported and stored, and efficient at releasing its energy in modern engines. Renewables are another matter.

[caption id="attachment_14020" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Erich Vieth (using creative commons images)"][/caption] How much energy do we need to replace? The number is staggering. "Replacing even half of the coal, oil, and gas consumed today would require 6 terawatts of renewable energy . . . In contrast, renewables today produce just 0.5 terawatts." Kerr suggests that oil production might peak at around 2030 and natural gas section might keep pace with demand only until 2050. What then? He suggests the the "sobering reality" that only one renewable, solar energy, could meet future energy demands by itself (although wind power could make significant contributions). All of the other types of renewables "would provide just 1/10 to 1/10000 of today's energy output from fossil fuels." How should we attempt such a daunting transition to cleaner fuels that are otherwise much less desirable? Kerr argues that the best way to approach this transition is to "reduce consumption," and, fortunately, we have the technology for reducing consumption drastically. I previously posted that modest conservation measures with regard to transportation could save enough oil to retire all of the 4000 oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Based on our long and unimpressive track record, Americans will readily express interest in reducing consumption but they lack the political will to actually do so. One huge approach to saving energy would be to immediately implement strict requirements for building highly energy-efficient residences and office buildings. There are many substantial things we could be doing to save energy, if only we cared enough about our future to do so. Kerr closes his article with this less than cheerful conclusion: "Conservation would buy time for meagerly attractive renewables to make some inroads before fossil fuels begin to bow out." (Note: Kerr's article is available online only to subscribers)

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If the Bible is really the word of God, why aren’t more people actually reading it?

Sit back and enjoy Bart Ehrman's research regarding what we know about the origin of the Bible. Ehrman is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . I've previously posted about Ehrman's 2007 book, Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman starts by telling the audience about a question that he asked his students recently: If the Bible is really the inerrant word of God, why aren't all believers actually reading it? Many of Ehrman's own students truly believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, but large numbers of them haven't yet read the entire Bible. Ehrman asks: "If God wrote a book, wouldn't you want to see what He said?" Most of this lecture concerns the origin of the modern version of the Bible. Ehrman presents a fascinating history of a book based upon thousands of incomplete and conflicting earlier versions. These versions are riddled with mistakes. The oldest copy that we have of any book of the new testament is a tiny scrap from the Gospel by "John" called "P52). It is about the size of a credit card and it only contains a couple sentences. It is dated at "the first half of the second century" (minute 15 of the video). Our earliest surviving complete copy of the Gospel of "John" was created about the year 200 A.D. Most of our manuscripts of the Bible are not anywhere near this old. Most of our manuscripts were created around the beginning of the third century (around the year 200). The earliest manuscripts of most of the books of the Bible date from the 7th or 8th century. By the time that a man named John Mill actually tracked the conflicts among the 100 manuscripts he reviewed (about 300 years ago), he noted about 30,000 differences. We now have about 7,000 manuscripts, and nobody has been able to add up all the differences among these copies (21:30). "There are more differences in our existing Greek manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." So, then how can we really know what any of the writers really said? Ehrman characterizes this as "a problem." Most of these differences are "completely insignificant . . . mistakes." I especially enjoyed Ehrman's description of one scribe's mistaken version of the alleged genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam and Eve (27:00). Many other more significant translation problems have been detected by modern scholars (32:00). Unfortunately, this video has a glitch and it ended at the 34-minute mark. This is as far as I got tonight. I now see that there are other versions of Ehrman's lectures available in ten-minute chunks, starting here. I'm planning on viewing the remainder of Ehrman's lecture, and I'll report on it in the comments. I would add a few questions to the one Ehrman asked at the top of his lecture: If the Bible really is the inspired word of God, why aren't more believers taking the time to understand the genesis of the Bible itself? Why aren't they more interested in learning about the things that Ehrman has researched throughout his career. Why don't they care more about the inaccuracies and contradictions? As Ehrman asked, don't you need to be confident that you know the accurate version of the Bible before telling others how "important" it is? I raise these questions because, in my experience of having discussed the Bible with hundreds of Christian believers, almost none of them know about these critically important issues raised by Ehrman, and it's a rare American Christian believer who exhibits any curiosity regarding these issues. How strange, unless, as Daniel Dennett suggested, that most believers believe in belief, rather than in the religious stories that they claim to be true. [More . . . ]

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Whose oil spill was it?

The Editors at Scientific American have reminded us that oil users (and that includes all of us) are pushing the big oil companies into taking the drilling risks they take:

[I]f we expect oil companies to manage risk better, then society as a whole needs to do the same. The market forces that encouraged BP to take ill-considered risks are largely of our own creation, as stockholders, consumers and citizens. The hodgepodge of subsidies that masquerades as our current national energy policy invites disaster; it fails to grapple with the urgent need to stop wasting energy and start encouraging clean sources. Every day we still need 85 million barrels of oil—the equivalent of more than 25 Ixtoc spills—to keep the wheels of our society turning.
If you do the math, you'll see that 85 million barrels of oil equals 3,570,000,000 gallons per day. That equals 148,750,000 gallons per hour, 2,479,166 gallons per minute, and 41,319 gallons per second. Americans are currently using an amount of oil that makes us staggeringly dependent on a dwindling natural resource that is mostly imported. And most of that imported oil is sending huge quantities of American dollars to regimes whose interests run counter to American interests. Our oil dependence should thus be seen as a major risk to our national security. We could slash this usage dramatically with reasonable conservation measures. But politicians believe that it is suicide to ask Americans for any form of sacrifice, even when national security depends on it.

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How air conditioning changed the United States

AT Salon.com, Ryan Brown reviews a new book by Stan Cox, "Losing our Cool." The topic is air conditioning. It inefficiently keeps us cool, but there are quite a few negatives that we need to consider:

We stay inside longer, exercise less, and get sick more often — and the electricity used to power all that A.C. is helping push the fast-forward button on global warming. The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century.

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