How many lives per gallon?
Wired.com has an insightful interview with Terry Tamminen, a former secretary of California’s Environmental Protection Agency, who has a new book out titled Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction.
I found this comment, in which Tamminen says coal is the lesser of two evils compared to oil, as quite interesting:
When doing the “well to wheel” analysis, there is an enormous quantity of energy to extract oil and turn it into anything useful, transporting it, and getting it into your car, and we are going to have to work even harder to get oil in the future. Coal-fired electricity or hydrogen is cleaner and safer, because you don’t have to go anywhere else in the world or kill anyone to get it. There are a lot of problems with coal, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t remember any time when coal has landed on a beach and killed birds and fish and destroyed entire economies.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
December 27th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
You might want to look into the number of lives that are lost due to particulate emissions from coal fired plants. Add to that the long term toll due to greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah, there is such a thing as “clean coal”, and CO2 capture schemes, but would they be used?
A good way to represent the lives per gallon for oil would be to fund our oil wars through a gasoline tax.
January 21st, 2007 at 10:45 am
Based on the total Iraq war death toll from 2003 to 2006 which is put at 655,000 war-related deaths from civilians and military that equals:
686 Miles of Bodies End to End
HOW MANY MILES PER GALLON IS THAT?