Syriana for the Quantitatively Oriented: The Transportation Oil Gap

If you’ve seen Syriana, you may have had some issue following the intertwined stories of the effect of oil on the world around us (and your implicit involvement). The issue is quite simply distilled when one just looks at the underlying data.

I stumbled across the following chart in the Transportation Energy Data Book (great bedtime reading).

Sometimes numbers have an elegant way of encoding human behavior. Of course, with each gallon of petroleum causing roughly 20 lbs of global warming-causing CO2 (no matter how new your car is), it’s easy to see why we have a global warming problem.