Making Every Oil Calorie Count

By AMANDA LITTLE
NYT

Nashville

AS turmoil in Libya pushes up the price of oil, American consumers are once again feeling the sting of $3.50-a-gallon gasoline. But the impact of costly crude on our lives and economy extends far beyond the pump. Virtually everything we consume — from hamburgers, running shoes and chemotherapy to Facebook, Lady Gaga MP3s and “60 Minutes” — is produced from or powered by fossil fuels and their byproducts, all of which could grow more costly as the price of petroleum rises.

The problem is that there is no easy way to quantify how much total energy we consume. Fortunately, there’s a great model already in widespread use: the nutritional information that appears on the back of every food product. Why not create the same sort of system for energy?

Americans use more oil than people in any other developed country, about twice as much per capita, on average, as Britons. Indeed, our appetite for petroleum, like our fondness of fast foods, has spawned a kind of obesity epidemic, but one without conspicuous symptoms like high blood pressure and diabetes. And because we don’t see how much energy goes into the products and services we purchase, we’re shielded from knowing the full extent of our personal energy demands — and unprepared when rising fuel prices increase the cost of everything else.

This illusion stems, in part, from a measurement problem: while we expect and understand labels on our food products that quantify caloric, fat and nutrient content, we have no clear way of measuring the amount of energy it takes to make our products and propel our daily activities.

(More here.)

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