Greenbeanman, I think you have it backwards. An imperial gallon is equal to almost five quarts. To convert, DIVIDE a U.S gallon by .83. The imperial gallon is equal to about 1.2 U.S gallons.(posted 9654 days ago)Patty, I agree that the U.S helps a lot of foreign countries. And, while I don't want to turn this forum into another center for contention, I do want to say that the U.S. also has been known to exploit a lot of people in a lot of third world countries. Without this exploitation, I don't believe we would have a standard of living that is so much higher than these countries. (higher in a material sense, at least)
Lesley's tale of fantastic increases in fuel oil prices is amazing! I suspect a lot more people are going to start thinking wood heat. (I have just as many trees dying this year in my forest as I did before the OPEC happenings. By the way, I can still remember the "oil shortage" of the early seventies. We were told by TPTB that the world was running out of oil, etc etc. As many of us knew at the time (I was working as a geologist for ARCO in 1968, when the first Prudhoe Bay oil strike ALONE proved out at a fifty year's extra reserve for ARCO and Texaco), and everyone found out eventually, there was no oil shortage. Just another scam to make the rich get richer.
Kirk, I agree with you--conservation is where it's at. I only drove my truck 4000 miles last year, which is the least ever in my life.
By the way, Kirk, and everybody, my friend, next door, who is a retired VP at Unical Oil Co. tells me that the US is actually using LESS oil now than in the early seventies, due to conservation. Considering our increased population, that is pretty impressive. I don't have any data to back up his claim, but I believe him. He's an honest man.
I do know that there has been a huge conservation effort in home heating costs. For instance, bs a builder I have been involved in the "Super Good Cents Program" for quite a few years (which the power company here discontinued three or four years ago, for some reason). Under this program, the contractor, or owner builder, would receive cash incentives for building the building to a higher energy efficiency level. The program worked extremely well: I can attest to that, as I have three of these houses as rentals, and the heating costs are very low.
One other thing. While I am not pleased about $2 per gallon gas, especially if the reason for it is to fatten some rich dude's purse, my neighbor (the Unical one) told me a year or so ago that if the price of oil goes up past $10 per million btu's, which is where it was during the 1970's oil "shortage", solar powered cars will start becoming economically competitive with gasoline powered cars. So maybe this "oil shortage" cloud will have a silver lining. Unfortunately, it will be at the expense of the poorer members of society, as usual.
Sheepish, at the risk of sounding like a "conspiracy theorist", I would like to mention that it is not necessarily "the government" which is controlling worldwide oil prices/quotas/shortages. I don't think any informed person will deny that there are some very powerful people controlling many aspects of our lives, particularly the world economy. WTO comes to mind. Just because there are a lot of unorganized beaurocrats in government does not mean that there is no one else, possibly a lot more organized, pulling strings on the government puppets.
Kim, I agree with what you are saying here. Certainly we are spoiled by cheap, subsidized, energy. Do you know that the U.S. was, until fairly recently, an oil EXPORTER? No more. We're too into STUFF.
Where'd you get the figures about using more energy to produce food than we get back in food? I hadn't heard that. Is this referring to only chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or what? I would assume that a plant would use a LOT more solar energy to make plant material that we would get back from the plant; otherwise the plant would have to be 100% efficient at building cells, and also we'd have to eat the whole plant.
Kim, I especially agree with you that we need to do more to encourage the use of alternative energy. There are a lot of things we can do now that don't even cost more money. I can personally speak for efficient building design, orientation, and so forth. Not to mention mass transit. It seems pretty lame to me to have to power a two ton hunk of steel and plastic all over the place, when all I really want to do is move my petite little 225 pound body over to a friend's house.
Jeez, time to get off my soap box!