54% of energy generated in the U.S. from Burning Dirty Coal, Petroleum, and Gas is lost.

We drill and spill and burn and pollute to get the energy and don't even use half of the energy that was generated.  

Charts of Energy and Consumption:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/chart-us-energy-use-reveals-oil-coal.php?campaign=weekly_nl

In addition,  the US currently uses about 19.7 million barrels of oil a day, 71% of which goes to transportation via cars, trucks, buses, airplanes. So, the longer we rely on the internal-combustion engine to fuel vehicles rather than electric cars, bikes and public transportation, the longer we stay dependent on drilling for those rapidly diminishing fossil fuels, which means more risky wells in deep water areas of the ocean and the inevitable occurrence of another disaster like the BP Deepwater Horizon spill.

Letter to Obama on fuel standards and reducing our dependency on oil.

These are my embellishments to a form letter written by Union of Concerned Scientists Action Center to be sent to Obama at a click of a button.  You are always supposed to customize them so they hopefully get more attention.  The 3rd and 4th paragraphs are theirs.

More than 20 years ago, I took a photo of graffiti on a wall in Spain that said basically, 'Americans are vampires of petroleum.'  And we've gotten even worse since then. 

I also recently saw an issue of Popular Mechanics from the '50s. The cover story was about the best cars with the best mileage. The artwork involved a graph showing the models and their mpg.  And guess what?  It was about the same as today!  There's been no improvement in 60 years!.  We've used the internal combustion engine for over 100 years with little innovation.

We cannot be held hostage any longer to America's addiction to oil. When we talk about the high price of gasoline, today's gas prices are the most visible, but certainly not the only price we pay. We pay in pollution. We pay in endangering our security. We pay in falling behind in the jobs that can come from a clean energy economy.

You have the ability to empower U.S. industry and U.S. drivers to be the solution to this problem once and for all. Raising fuel efficiency and global warming emissions standards to the equivalent of 60 mpg by model year 2025 would save the average U.S. driver nearly $9,000 over the life of the vehicle at $4 gas prices, even after paying for cleaner car technology. That's like cutting the gas price from $4 to less than $2.75 a gallon, all while cutting global warming emissions and creating jobs right here in the United States! 

Personally, I don't mind the higher gas prices. It's seems to be the only way to get Americans to conserve or change their lifestyles. I know it will be painful in the short term, but the changes we have to make will be amongst the best things that ever happened to the planet. 

A few additional details that need to be addressed:

-We need better home building methods (which exist but builders keep building things the same old way), solar and wind turbines on our roof tops, more walkable cities, and more fuel efficient transportation methods.

-Why didn't you make the automakers convert factories to produce mass transit equipment rather than close them down as part of the bailout?  We have to buy these things from overseas.  Manufacturing needs to be more local. Perhaps the government can help interested businesses purchase these factories by guaranteeing them the contracts for the equipment?

-Also, why do we not require methane gas to be captured to keep it out of the atmosphere and to be used as fuel.  They just vent it into the atmosphere where it's the worst of the greenhouse gases at coal mines, oil and gas wells, land fills, etc.  Why are we so wasteful? In other countries, they have generators that produce electricity directly from this. It could be used to power equipment at the mine, well, landfill or neighborhoods that surround the landfill. 

Along that note, any nuclear power plant should have a turbine that keeps turning producing power to circulate cooling water and run equipment as long as there is heat coming from the reactor.  Simple solution to what has happened in Japan.

-Please stop subsidizing corn! For any purpose, but especially for ethanol! It is a low yield per acre crop that requires tons of harmful fertilizer.  It wastes more energy to grow and produce the ethanol than we get from the ethanol.  And the products they make from it are bad for our health. It's also a lousy food for livestock.  It makes them unhealthy.    Instead subsidize small farmers that grow  vegetables and humanely raise livestock for sale locally.

Invest in the future. Oil and gas, is not the future.

A whale skimmer

So perhaps with all the extra oil gushing into the Gulf since they removed the cap again, perhaps they should be putting to use giant tanker skimmer they are so skeptical about because it works better where there's a lot of fresh oil.  And maybe they are, but I have no way of knowing since the media does such a poor job of providing updates on details such as this.

Of course, there'd be more fresh oil concentrated in one place if they'd stop spraying toxic dispersant which are just making the problem worse.

Here are a few articles saying they've extended testing of A Whale.

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/07/a_whale_oil_skimmer_testing_ex.html

and
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0707/Oil-skimmer-A-Whale-gets-some-tweaks-in-bid-to-work-the-BP-oil-spill  which mentioned that it was able to keep skimming while the other boats quit due to rough seas, something television news programs have failed to mention.

Methane

So, I only recently learned that methane is 85% of the fairly clean burning fuel we call natural gas. I don't know why I never heard that before.  And methane the most damaging of the green house gases (which I did know) so apparently we are better off burning it for energy.

And thanks to mining and drilling disasters. I've observed that it just gets released into the atmosphere in all our carbon fuel extracting activities like coal mining and oil drilling. Not to mention by decomposing plant products and animal waste and the outrageous number of cattle we raise. And yet we do nothing to capture all that. 

Why would a coal mine just vent the methane into the atmosphere when there's money to be made from it?  Why wouldn't natural gas companies make deals with the coal, oil and waste management companies?  Why would they rather pump millions of gallons of water into the earth to extract shale gas and let the toxic water seep into our water system?

If we are better off burning it for fuel than letting it get released into the atmosphere, then it should be the law that it be captured.

So have you started reducing your carbon footprint yet?

I don't mean recycling. I mean reducing.

Everyone is criticizing big oil and BP, yet I don't see any more people refusing the plastic bags and/or bringing their own in the stores.  Except in places like Whole Foods, I look around and I'm usually the only one with my own bags.

And are you using any fewer plastic bottles yet?  Wasting any less gas yet?  Adjusted your thermostat yet?  Turned things off yet?

Also, here's a blog post about oiled wildlife on Grand Terre island from many days ago.  Why is the media only now telling us about this? Why do they keep reporting from Grand Isle?
http://birding.typepad.com/gulf/2010/05/day-33-heavy-oil-and-carnage-to-grand-terre-island.html