Perhaps this is the answer to Bush's mysterious switch on conservation. Apparently, the US miltary is being weighed down by its consumption of fuel. Gelu Sulugiuc reports that the US military is consuming 12 times the fuel per soldier in Iraq than the US consumed in WWII.
I doubt Bush would have thought much of conservation if it was just something to preserve nature. The fact that the world's oil consumption is a major threat to the US military will spur action. The US prominence in the world today is funded strongly on our high per capita consumption of fuel. The great American suburban sprawl and dream of single family home ownership are not tenable at $10 a gallon gas.
One thing mentioned in the article is that armored vehicles consume more gas than unarmored vehicles. Did you notice in the recent spat about some US vehicles not having adequate armor only talked about the price of the armor and not about the price of the extra fuel needed to transport the armor.
How should human lives figure in this equation of conservation of energy? If doubling the energy consumption per US soldier could reduce American casualities in Iraq, should we double that consumption?
Anyway, do to the skyrocketing cost of fuel, the US military is now becoming a leading conservationist.
As for the rest of us. I am always baffled as to why so few people figure the cost of fuel into their various equations. We consider the cost of the RV into the our dreams of seeing the west, but fail to factor in the tanks of gas.
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