Energy Consumption broken down by Fuel, Effect, and Waste
I'm taking a Science For the Mass Media course here at Cornell, and today in "lab" we were presented by a very interesting flow-graph from Science Magazine. The researchers break down the output of the U.S. energy inputs. I spent about forty-five minutes writing a draft of an editoral, which I'll also post here. I'll warn you now that some of the statistics I used are estimates and shoddy (they're marked by footnote), but the graph itself is well done and contains some very interesting information. (Who knew combustion engines produced between 20% and 50% of our energy waste?) Anyway, here it is. You may need a Science subscription or a school account to pull up the article.
Link to Science.
Editoral:
Back in the days of heightened anxiety over domestic terrorism, a series of faux-public service announcements directed towards complacent SUV drivers implied that their gas guzzlers increase U.S. spending on oil from the middle east, which in turn supplies funding to terrorists.
While I wrote these announcements off as fear-mongering from camps opposing the use of fossil fuels (I still do), they correctly highlight the overwhelming flow of energy imports that find their way to the tanks of American vehicles.
Surprisingly, 44% of U.S. total oil output goes directly into light-duty vehicles like cars, pick-up trucks, and SUVs. Additionally, another 25% of total oil consumption is by freight transport and aircraft. Of this 70% of total U.S. oil consumption, 55% (footnote1) is imported from foreign nations.
The level of this dependence on imported oil dwarfs our dependence in all other areas of the energy sector. Electricity generation, the largest wholesale consumer of fuels, depends almost entirely on domestic fuels. Consumption by industry, because of its use of domestic sources of natural gas, relies on only 25% (footnote2) on foreign sources.
Aircraft, automobiles, freighters, and gas guzzling SUVs are the largest sources of foreign energy consumption. Their effect on U.S. foreign policy and the environment is pronounced.
There is, however, room for improvement. Of the oil consumed by aircraft, automobiles, freighters, and gas guzzling SUVs, 74% of this energy potential is lost as waste, and these sources are the largest bulk contributor of wasted energy in the United States.
Industrial, commercial, and residential consumers burn oil to almost 80% efficiency (4 out of 5 units used effectively), but the poor performance of smaller scale combustion engines results in the effective use of only 1.5 out of every 5 units. The remainder is lost, primarily as heat. The amount of heat lost by these sources is two and a half times larger than all the energy distributed by all the power lines in the United States.
The upside to these dour numbers is that the development of energy efficient, electric, or hybrid vehicles stands out as an area of conservation research with the most to gain.
(Another area of potentially fruitful energy research would be the development of more efficient electricity generation, transmission, and distribution, which produces twice as much waste as it does usable energy.)
I Am Published
Shameless self-promotion is never a pretty thing, but my student Note was just published in the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, and I thought that I'd pass along the link since the topic might be of some interest (it's not in Lexis quite yet, alas). The federal Freedom of Information Act gives representatives of the news media quicker, cheaper access to government documents than to the general public, and my article looks at the caselaw and regs to determine whether bloggers would qualify, then outlines a proposed approach to the challenges bloggers pose to the current FOIA system. The Journal's homepage, from which you can download a .pdf of my Note, is here. It's about 10,000 words -- they stretch it out over 45 pages, but the print is big.
This is a Russo-heavy issue of the Journal, actually, as I edited the other two Notes as well. The one on property disputes in the Episcopal Church is pretty interesting, dealing with a problem in the jurisprudence of religion that doesn't get a lot of lay attention, namely, how a court figures out how to divvy up church property when a church decides to split from its diocese. The other article, which deals with federal reimbursement of state Medicaid expenditures on Native Americans, might be a bit wonky, though. But if you have nothing better to do with your life on a Saturday night, hey, it's all free.
Doctor says you're going home today, Mr. X
According to a story in the LA Times, "a paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van."
Since I began volunteering on Skid Row several months ago there have been numerous cases of what police call "homeless dumping" where hospitals abandon indigent patients on Skid Row when their insurance or other funds run out, but leaving a helpless paraplegic to crawl in the gutter half-naked sinks to an all-time low.
What has become of us as a nation? Does the ruthless drive for the Almighty Dollar trump even the slightest shred of human sympathy for others? I personally hope he sues their Presbyterian derrieres into oblivion, I have no doubt there are lawyers in L.A. who would take his case with relish. In a just world, he would end up owning the hospital. Of course, in a just world, this would never have happened.
