You think we waste gasoline here in the US?

From the Sunday NY Times magazine's article on "The Perils of Petrocracy" comes this sobering passage concerning the situation in Venezuela:

..."A gallon of gasoline costs 6.3 cents at the pump at the unofficial exchange rate. And Venezuela is now gorging on gas. Venezuela will add 450,000 new cars this year — about four times the number of four years ago. Six Hummer dealerships are set to open early next year...."

Nothing like pissing away the limited natural resource that has become the foundation of your country's survival. The article describes how people rioted when the government attempted to raise gasoline prices.

This is a sobering reminder that it is the whole world that must change, not just the US.

Refering to the role of fossil fuels in plastics and pretty much everything we need to maintain civilization. He's damn right, too. What they hell are we coing to build computers out of when we've burned all the precious fossil fuels and send them into the atmosphere? Wood? That will be preciously rare as people try to heat their homes in an oil crunch. MEtal? How will be mine and shape it? We need plastics.

Oil really IS too precious to be sending out the tailpipe.

I was having conspiracy fantasies last night. I think conspiracy theories are so gratifying because they give the sense that SOMEBODY has it all under control and civilization has a future...

hatched by people with seriously overblown hubris and no concern for consequences.

"Six Hummer dealerships are set to open early next year...."

So this commie Chavez (destroyer of economies, thief of hard-earned monies, etc etc etc) is presiding over a bustling economy that can support 6, count 'em 6 new Hummer dealerships???

Man, that monied class down there must REALLY be suffering!


And i'll throw in another thing. Having visited Caracas, I have never seen a public transport system so utilized. I dream of having a system like that where i live.

The article did speak glowingly of the mass transit. It'd be shameful to have mass transit given up in favor of private cars for commuting and basic transportation.

has anyone calculated how much gas the US military uses in a day? on a frivolous war?

CVs burn thru 2,700bbl of DFM and 6,500bbl of JP-5 per day.

CVN's (nuclear) burn around 6,500bbl of JP-5 per day.

The support ships will each consume upwards of 700bbl of DFM every day.

And I believe that we have two of those groups hanging around the Gulf right now.

roughly 1.5 percent of US total

I've looked for this info in the past but couldn't find it.

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1333

there is a big error in the first part of the article,
that gets corrected in the discussion

312 million bpd, should be,

312 thousand bpd