Real Cost of Oil Equates to $10 Gallon Gasoline

[Jim Warren]

Copulos, a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition, presented these figures yesterday at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on "The Hidden Cost of Oil." In his testimony he released newly updated figures of his 2003 study "America's Achilles Heel: The Hidden Costs of Imported Oil," a comprehensive analysis of the external costs of imported oil. The study computed the externalities of imported oil and divided them into three basic categories: Direct and Indirect economic costs, Oil Supply Disruption Impacts and Military Expenditures in a non-war year.

"It is important to understand that even though external costs are not be reflected in the price at the pump, they are very real and we pay for many of them through our income tax," said Anne Korin, chair of the Set America Free Coalition. "Copulos' study is a disturbing reminder that the U.S. economy is bleeding and that hundreds of billions of dollars that could have stayed in the U.S., producing jobs and investment opportunities, are finding their way to the coffers of those who wish us harm."

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=11520&url=

[Nikki Stone1]

1. kick and recommend

:kick:

[havocmom]

2. Yep we've been living a lie for decades

and reality is about to bite us on the butt

[marmar]

3. Excellent...

And when the spigot dries up, we're screwed. In Western Europe and Japan, they've at least built extensive electricity-powered transit infrastructures.

[Jim Warren]

4. yeah, but, but,

they hadta use taxes to do that.

:sarcasm:

[BlueEyedSon]

5. Since no one is paying taxes, we are financing the gas via the nat'l debt

[Old and In the Way]

6. Our defense budget ought to be paid for at the pump.

I'd think that'd be around $300BB + the costs of the Iraq War.

[Jim Warren]

7. Critical Path

By chance I was re-reading some of Bucky Fuller's 1980(!)book over the weekend.
In it, he does an interesting equation estimating the the real cost of a barrel of oil to be about a million 1980 dollars, given the cost of power, etc., at the time, to apply sufficient heat and pressure to the biomass necessary to produce a barrel of the sludge.