Thirteen Days

I remember when oil hit $70 the first time we were screaming that it would kill our economy...but now that it's above $80 how come we aren't chanting "Drill, baby, drill?"

Just looking for a little consistency, that's all.



The world burns roughly 80 million barrels per day. A billion every 13 days. Every thirteen days another billion is burnt. Our recession has only marginally slaked the worldwide consumption of oil.

The U.S. consumes 25%, or 20 million a day. Based on percentage of population alone, my little Elk Grovian hamlet uses about 8,525 barrels per day, or 3.1 million barrels per year. Doesn't seem like a whole lot, does it? That's less than one hour's worth of world production.

Well, I hasten to add that any Elk Grovian likely consumes above the national average as he or she is totally, 100% beholden to his or her car. Thirty miles a day to get to any job, to the doctors office, to the store, to recreate. Every Elk Grovian simply assumes that every thirteen days another billion barrels are found, pumped, and timely and cheaply delivered to her local gasoline dispensary.

Consider that ANWR holds, on the high end, 16 billion barrels. That's about 2/3rds of one year at the rate the world uses oil. Consider that that the U.S. holds 120 billion, or about 16 years at the rate the U.S. uses oil. This is why we import oil, why we will continue to import oil, why we will continue to be even more dependent on foreign oil as we perpetually motor along, why we are entrenched in wars in oil exporting regions of the world, and why we will wage wars around the globe in the future to ensure Elk Grovian automobiling continues.

Of course I've not considered our free market...when the price signals are right we will make an easy wholesale swap to batterized cars and continue our motoring. I've been wrong about a great many things -- perhaps I shouldn't be quite so doomish. When the market deems it so, we'll then have a cheap blanket of Danish wind and Chinese solar farms over our desert southwest and so 'lectricity will be powering all our Japanese battterized vehicles, while we continue to enjoy beef jerkey in our air conditioned vehicles as we drive them 85 miles a day to work and back as we sprawl ever outwards. We won't need oil then, now will we?