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Oil By Numbers
$11.68 billion . . . That's how much money ExxonMobil reported earning in its second quarter report.
1 . . . That's the rank of ExxonMobil's quarterly profit among all American companies. Ever.
Doubled . . . That's what happened to the price of a barrel of oil from 2001 to 2005.
Doubled again . . . That's what happened to the price of a barrel of oil from 2005 to March 2008.
Rose 40% . . . That's what happened to the price of a barrel of oil from March to July 2008.
85.5 million . . . That's how many barrels of oil the world consumes every day.
1.9 million . . . That's how many barrels of oil the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would produce per day, at best and not for 20 years, if Congress opened it to drilling today.
2 million . . . That's how many barrels of oil that protected areas of the Outer-Continental Shelf would produce per day, at best and not for 7 years, if Congress opened them to drilling today. LINK
2.5 million . . . That's how many barrels of oil we'd save per day by 2020 if Washington, instead, doubled federal gas mileage standards for new cars and trucks.
$10 billion . . . That's how much we're still spending every month on the war in Iraq.
In short, Big Oil is earning record profits and oil prices are
skyrocketing because oil consumption is high and supplies are low and
all the oil in Alaska and all the oil off the coasts of Florida and
California won't lower prices or reduce our dependence on foreign oil,
so if we want to stop spending billions on wars in countries that, as
Al Gore says, happen to have a lot of oil, we better start conserving and shifting to clean energy. Now.
How much did you spend in taxes on the war in Iraq last year? And how much clean energy would that money have bought? Click here to find out.
Comments (4)
How about you get off the scapegoat express and stop counting how much money someone else legally made?
How about you get off your ass, give up your car and use a bycicle to get to work?
Other than Time-mag-style rants and raves, what have YOU done? Delegated to Obama when he's Prez?
August 1, 2008 9:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd add the amount the Valdez spill cost, especially since the award was reduced.
August 2, 2008 12:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Um. What's with all the trollers nowadays? Repubs must be getting nervous.
Nevermind the fact that I ride public transit to work every day. But thanks for making assumptions about me- isn't that what GOPs are good at?
Thanks, Donal for adding a valuable aspect to the discussion.
You Lalo35, can kiss my ass. And I don't even care if I get kicked off this site for saying that- I'm pretty much done with all the abusers on this blog and no system of accountability.
August 2, 2008 2:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Open and closed. Hmmm ... what's that again ?
The conceptual foundation of the Oil Age was the view that the planet was an OPEN SYSTEM into which the negative aspects of petroleum consumption could be dumped, for free. Ironically it was an Oil spill off the S. California coast which triggered the modern environmental movement whose main thesis is that the Earth comprises a CLOSED SYSTEM. In a CLOSED SYSTEM the negative aspects(air, water and ground pollution) of resource consumption cannot be swept under a rug and ignored but must be addressed, accounted for and mitigated.
We as a global population are now in the midst of a paradigm shift from the former to the later. For many of the six billion of us and our cultures it will be an existential experience. We need to step nimbly into the future in this matter. Clinging to the past will only leave us all in a dirty, ugly and mean spirited world.
August 2, 2008 2:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
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