July 12th, 2007
Scary Graph Of How U.S. Consumes More Gas Per Day Than Entire World.
From The Economist:
So in 2003, we used more gasoline than the next 20 consumers worldwide did. COMBINED. What does that say for our country other than we waste a ton of fuel driving when we could take public transportation, driving giant SUV’s that never see a dirt road, never mind an actual foray into 4-wheeling, and our gasoline is too cheap? Complain all you want, but the only way to get consumption down and have a chance at making the oil we do have last a little longer is to up gas prices significantly.
That graph really puts things in perspective, no?
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I think that this set of graphs is misleading.
The consumption numbers probably are true, but to get a true picture you would have to correlate them with geography (Japan is the size of California), population) Canada is bigger geographically than the US, but has 10% of the people), population density (all of Europe is denser than the US), and vehicles per capita (China is 10/1000, USA is 467/1000). [Data from CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia - World Population Density, and Earthtrends.org respectively.]
While I agree with you that lowering consumption is always good, I think that this data is presented in a way to make the US look bad.
p.s. As someone that had to use a Honda Accord to get a few sheets of drywall home yesterday, I think that the evil of SUVs is overstated.
[...] The Good Human highlighted an interesting graphic illustrating US gas consumption vs. the rest of the world. [...]