The Gulf Spill has been going and going and going…it is very sad not doubt. 

My question is how does the spill stack up to what goes on each and every day? 

The spill in the Gulf is spewing some 5,000 to 70,000 barrels of oil per day. (The estimates are a bit all over the board – but lets call it 50,000 per day.)

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Why the big uproar?  Well of course because we “see” the oil in the water, we “see” the oil on animals, we “smell” the oil when we are near the beach – it is on the news 24/7 and by now has its own web cam, web site and twitter page!

So I wonder – is this a lot of oil?  Is this a lot – 50,000 barrels per day?

In the US we use about 20,000,000 that is twenty million barrels of oil per day, that is almost 1,000,000 barrels per hour! Thus as a nation we use 400X four hundred times as much oil per day as the is being spilled into the Gulf.

Globally we consume about 80,000,000 barrels of oil per day – 1,600X the amount of the spill (again per day!).

Why no fuss about this oil?  Well of course we “can not see” the oil in our air, we “can not see” the oil in our lungs, we “can not see the oil in the oceans”. 

The whole point of the Climate Change/CO2 discussion is that burning 80,000,000 barrels of oil per day has created a global disaster.  Unlike the current spill, we do not only  ”not see”  per se the problems related to our daily oil usage, we actually get real short term benefits from the burning of oil – we get to work for example.

It is always sad when these type of visable problems occure, about that there is no question, but as a people and planet we must ask how much longer can this go on at all?  When will we agree as a civilization to move off of oil and coal to clean sources of energy for our world….

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Read the original post at The Climate Community.