The Sightline Institute has created a little widget that shows us the spending in our state on gas and oil.
I thought about putting it in the sidebar for this site, but decided it would be a little busy after the novelty wears off. If you’d like your own copy, you can get it here.
5 responses to “Watch Our Money Burn Up”
Maybe a trifle, but it’s important that we consider in what category our energy spending is going to… what percentage of that spending is “mandatory” – minimal home heating and lighting, shipping our goods around the country and overseas, etc?
What we’d really want to know is what percentage of our energy is wasted on frivolous things (to keep things uber-simple, personal driving and non-essential transit trips)
“what percentage of that spending is “mandatory” – minimal home heating and lighting, shipping our goods around the country and overseas, etc?”
That is a very interesting question, and it depends upon your definition of “mandatory.” I’ve got a bicycle trailer that will hold 300 lbs, and I regularly go 5-10 miles with it, buy something large, (lumber, beer keg, furniture, carpet cleaning equipment, etc) and then drag it home. So I personally would say that 90% of the gasoline used in less than 5 mile trips is optional, (ambulances trips or concrete trucks trips, for instance, can not really be replaced with bicycles.) But there are plenty of people that would disagree with me, they’d complaining about “rain” and stuff like that, and say that most driving was mandatory.
Where are the calculations for this thing?
It seems an arbitarily created number, I’d love to see what they’re actually counting and would could and could NOT be cut out.
:)
Madatory Driving == Weakness
Where are the calculations for this thing?
It seems an arbitarily created number, I’d love to see what they’re actually counting and would could and could NOT be cut out.
:)
Madatory Driving == Weakness
I just double posted because the server kept reporting that there was a “server error”. Then I navigated back to this page and two of them appear automagically.