According to the CEO of Chevron
According to David O’Reilly the CEO of CHEVRON, the world currently consumes oil at a rate of about 40,000 US gallons per second. He says, “the scale of the energy system is enormous.”
So, I did some math.
1 barrel of oil = 42 US gallons
1 cubic meter = 264.17 US gallons
According to the 2008 World Fact-book, the world currently consumes about 85,270,000 barrels of oil per day.
85,270,000 barrels per day x 42 US gallons per barrel = 3,581,340,000 US gallons per day = 149,222,500 US gallons per hour = 2,487,042 US gallons per minute = 41,451 US gallons per second.
So, Mr. O’Reilly was right when he said that the world consumes about 40,000 US gallons of oil per second.
41,451 US gallons of oil per second = approximately 157 cubic meters of oil per second.
Imagine a river of oil.
I thought it might interesting to see just how much oil we are talking about here, so I compared the amount of oil that we are currently burning in the world to the amount of water that flows in various waterfalls.
I used average yearly flow rate figures.
The flow rate of Jog Falls is about 153 cubic meters per second, a little less than our imaginary river of oil.
You can see what 153 cubic meters per second looks like here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU0CjwPVfrw
Now imagine it on fire with black smoke billowing into the air.
To adamantly insist that this couldn’t be effecting the environment is irrational.
Harryhammer's Blog 
10 Responses to “According to the CEO of Chevron”
no on is suggesting that rivers of black couldn’t affect the environment…it most certainly does in the form of pollution, but it is also irrational to insist that putting a trace gas into the environment changes the climate…
What’s rational about satellite television or the radio for that matter?
Science is for the most part highly abstract.
Take mathematics for example:
You lock a bunch of mathematicians in a room and they manipulate some squiggles on a page and come up with a way to split an atom.
Quantum physics is another example.
The mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics is totally abstract and its implications are often very non-intuitive. The centerpiece of this mathematical system is the wave-function. The wave-function is a mathematical function of time and space that can provide information about the position and momentum of a particle, but only as probabilities, as dictated by the constraints imposed by the uncertainty principle.
With respect to trace elements in the atmosphere, what’s happening now is nothing new.
In the 1980’s, scientists were concerned about the ozone layer when most of the world didn’t have the slightest clue about what ozone was. Scientists were saying that a compound best known by the DuPont brand name “Freon” was harming the planet. They said that certain chemicals were destroying part of the atmosphere that is essential for human life because it blocks out harmful ultraviolet radiation that causes cancer.
Read: Opinions that Matter
Beginning with work by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that gases in the atmosphere might trap the heat received from the Sun. As Fourier put it, energy in the form of visible light from the Sun easily penetrates the atmosphere to reach the surface and heat it up, but heat cannot so easily escape back into space. For the air absorbs invisible heat rays (“infrared radiation”) rising from the surface. The warmed air radiates some of the energy back down to the surface, helping it stay warm.
This was the effect that would later be called, by an inaccurate analogy, the “greenhouse effect.”
[…] The world’s oil consumption in real-time: Jog […]
Look at this image and see how thin and vulnerable the atmosphere (the blue line) really is
winespius :
> …it is also irrational to insist that putting a trace gas into the environment changes the climate…
No, it would be ignorant to deny the overwhelming science that demonstrates humans have increased a potent greenhouse gas by ~40% since pre-industrial which is rapidly changing the climate system, melting glaciers and acidifying the oceans.
[…] Chicago. To get a picture of ongoing global consumption, there’s a handy waterfall analogy. This guy did the math, and figured out that Jog Falls in India (see clip below) flows at nearly the same […]
Hi,
I was wondering where you got your information of the flow rate of this river? Any place other than wikipedia?
I got my information from the World Waterfall Database:
http://www.world-waterfalls.com/home.php
[…] According to the CEO of Chevron Posted on January 1, 2011 by harryhammer| Leave a comment According to David O'Reilly the CEO of CHEVRON, the world currently consumes oil at a rate of about 40,000 US gallons per second. He says, "the scale of the energy system is enormous." So, I did some math. 1 barrel of oil = 42 US gallons 1 cubic meter = 264.17 US gallons According to the 2008 World Fact-book, the world currently consumes about 85,270,000 barrels of oil per day. 85,270,000 barrels per day x 42 US gallons per barrel = 3,581,340,00 … Read More […]
This type of irrationality is almost hardwired into our brains. Humans are concerned only with the immediate future. If you are gathering food for your tribe, you need to act now. You aren’t concerned with food stores years down the road, you are concerned with food stores today. Problems that our ancestors faced were immediate: snow storms, predators, floods, etc.
In modern times, people plan three years in the future at most. Think presidential elections here. When was the last time you heard a world leader talk about a plan that spanned hundreds of years in the future? You don’t, because our psychological makeup seeks immediate rewards and gains, and we only respond to imminent danger.
Global warming is like a giant snowball bearing down on us that is gaining momentum. It’s still far enough away that people link it will dissipate by itself before it runs us over. It’s also still far enough away that another crowd thinks we can be proactive and dissipate it ourselves. Most people don’t care either way, they have more immediate problems they have to deal with.
The clincher is that global warming is unlike any past problem and our conventional way of thinking won’t fly. The best way to proceed is to be proactive, especially since 99.9% of experts say doing nothing will lead to disaster. This is the only planet/home we have, I like to take care of it as such.