I'm thoroughly convinced that there are more cars than ants in this world. Alright, maybe that might be an exaggeration but it's really sick how many cars there are. Think about it...no matter where you drive nowadays, especially in those metropolitan cities, you can't escape the cars and the amount of cars on the highways and city roads. You've also probably pulled your hair out being stuck in traffic; traffic not due to an accident or a closed road but just because there isn't enough road to accommodate all the cars. So with this said, I wanted to provide insight into just how much gas the United States consumes in a year, being that we're the world's largest energy producer, consumer, and importer.
Lets break it down: We as a nation consume 20 million barrels of oil A DAY! A barrel of oil (about 42 gallons) gets about 20 gallons of gasoline. Doing the math, that brings us to about 400 million gallons of gasoline consumption in one day. Push the math a little further, and that rounds out to about 146 billion gallons of gasoline A YEAR!
Now these figures are amazing, but more frighteningly amazing is what happens to the gasoline when it burns and what it means to us. When gasoline burns, it turns into carbon dioxide gas...a lot of it. A gallon of gas releases about 5-6 lbs. of carbon into our atmosphere.
I'm not sure exactly how resilient the atmosphere is but at this going rate, we as a gasoline-dependent nation are really beating down the environment and it'll be interesting and daunting to see the negative effects this will all have for the future generations.
-Rack of Lam
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