Re: Hydrogen economy leads to environmental disaster

Posted by Dale on Feb 15, 2002 at 08:47
157.arc1.il-decatur1.fgi.net (204.212.222.65)

Re: Hydrogen economy leads to environmental disaster (DA Morgan)

If we added to the cost of every barrel of oil, the cost of the US Defense Department effort to keep it available, oil would be so expensive only a handful of people could afford to drive a car.

Time to drag out the calculator, Danny. You know what a calculator is, don't you Danny? The US defense budget for 2001 was $306,000,000,000. The US oil consumption was about 6,500,000,000 barrels. That means that if we allocate the entire military budget to oil, then the cost of a barrel of oil would increase $47. We certainly wouldn’t want to allocate any costs to lubrication oils or jet fuel or any of the other products we get from a barrel of oil EXCEPT gasoline. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil but we only get 19 gallons of gasoline. Therefore: if we assume that the entire cost of the military should be allocated to gasoline (because everyone would love us if we had a hydrogen economy and no one would want to steal our stuff if we just didn’t support all those evil oil exporting countries) the cost of a gallon of gasoline should be about $3.50/gallon. That’s about the cost of a gallon in Germany. Funny, I thought the Germans were still driving cars. I didn’t realize it is only a handful of Germans who can afford to drive a car.

But there is a salvation. If we eliminated the military because we no longer needed gasoline, we could also eliminate the $0.44 / gallon of taxes (I’m sure you will agree that the military is the real sink of all our tax money). That brings the price down to $3/gallon. Still far too expensive for anyone but you, Danny, but I really think there might be more than a handful who could afford it. After all, in 1981 the inflation adjusted price of gas in the US was $2.55/gallon.


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