Green Taxi

Jon Udell put together an incredibly interesting chart and map of the amount of oil the US receives from each continent and country in the world.  Visit the site and walk through each continent yourself.  This image does not do it justice.

Remember that this is the source of oil for only the US.  It is truly staggering.  We use more oil from Africa than we do from the Middle East, including more oil from Nigeria than Iraq and roughly the same amount from Nigeria as Saudi Arabia.  Canada provides almost twice as much oil to us as Saudi Arabia does.

Obviously this is different for every other country in the world (Europe attains much more from the Middle East than from Canada), but it is important in regards to the global wars that the US is involved in.  There is of course an argument for both sides.  Yes, losing oil from the Middle East would only cut off 17% of our oil supply, but 17% is still a massive amount of oil.  And Canada is not a risk at all in terms of cutting off the US oil supply.

But, it also makes the push for alternative energy all that more feasible.  The thought seems to be that we need to replace all of our oil consumption at once.  Of course replacing all would be great, but what if we just replaced 17% of our oil consumption?  We could cut off the Middle East entirely.  Wouldn’t that lead to an interesting situation?

Now, if you look at Jon’s other chart of where the oil in the world still resides, you will realize that we cannot just cut the Middle East off entirely until we have replaced much more than 17% of of our oil dependence with alternative energy sources.  It is not just about current consumption, but also about future consumption.  Speaking of that, I would love to see one of these charts from the past five decades.  This sort of thought process sure changes the strategy for how we approach both our alternative energy growth plans and the Middle East reliance plans for years to come.

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