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Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.

I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....

The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck.

I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable.

When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows.

My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.

I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life.

Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.

The impact of any one individual's environmental choices on my life is basically zero. People in aggregate matter, but individuals have minuscule effects. At least, for the people that I interact with. Things might be different if I spent a lot of time chatting with Senators. But I don't.

Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.

To put it another way, I think the whole effort to frame environmental policy as a matter of personal virtue is both ineffective and cruel. Lecturing people is not an effective way to change their behavior. And in many cases, people make environmentally poor decisions because they don't have much choice. Many many jobs in the US effectively require that you have a car. Many affordable residences also effectively require that you own a car and drive a lot. People need jobs and they need shelter, and for many people their existing jobs and homes lock them into having one car per adult in the home.

In other policy areas, we've decided that an issue is important enough and should be taken out of the realm of personal virtue and placed into the realm of social action. My brother is disabled. He doesn't have to go around begging for coins so that he can eat this month. There's no opportunity for you to demonstrate your personal virtue by donating cash to him. Instead, we've all decided that seriously disabled people shouldn't have to go around begging to survive, so everyone is going to have a chunk of cash taken from their paycheck used to cover Social Security Disability Insurance. We lose a bit of cash, but in exchange we get to live in a society where severely disabled people don't die on the street because they can't work. We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.

We should do the same thing with climate change. Greenhouse gases are bad. So put a tax on them and let the market find a way to reduce them. Then we won't have to harass random people who make lifestyle choices we don't like; instead, people will make choices that in aggregate are more effective at mitigating climate change. In the story above, the truck driving apartment dweller would have more cash to spend than the car driving McMansion dweller, which will be far more effective in getting the McMansion dweller to change her behavior than any amount of lecturing, no matter how technically correct it is.

Trading sanctimony and self-righteousness for policy effectiveness seems like a huge win to me.

We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.

I'm glad that your brother is now able to live a more rewarding life without having to degrade himself or wonder where his next meal is coming from.

On the other hand, I'm sad that as a society, we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue. In some ways, I can no longer be as virtuous as I might like: I have less money to give because it's been taxed away from me to give to others; or I've got less time to give, because my time is dedicated to earning that money that is being taken from me.

I have no evidence to support this, but I sometimes wonder if the fact that so much of virtue is taken away from us, that we're not in the habit of being virtuous, and that in turn makes it more difficult for us to make bigger overtures. Just a thought...

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will. Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue

Really? I do not see any evidence for this intent anywhere. Certainly, the point of SSDI is not exclusively the removal of an opportunity for personal virtue. There is also the fact that everyone here is one car accident and brain injury away from being incapable of working or caring for themselves. And while some people will purchase disability insurance, some will not and those people will become a drain on the public purse. Better, both in moral terms and in economic efficiency to make everyone pay for a baseline insurance package.

More to the point, there is nothing stopping you from volunteering to help the disabled or anyone else. SSDI provides a minimal standard of living, but we all prefer to live on more than the absolute minimum. There is more to life than a small monthly check can possibly provide, so there is ample opportunity for you to express your virtue by helping disabled people.

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will.

I think you're conflating morality and law. The law compels your behavior. It cannot make you moral. There is no law against being a bigot or even saying bigoted things per se.

Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

As I understand it, hate speech is only a crime in the US when it occurs in conjunction with a systemic campaign of discrimination or a violent crime. I'd say that if the only thing keeping you from launching into long diatribes about how various racial groups are genetically inferior (while either discriminating against them or assaulting/murdering one of their members) is the possibility of legal sanction, then you are not actually a virtuous person. And this lack of virtue really cannot be blamed on society. Or the law.

I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices.

There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity.

Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per-person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs).

As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject.

There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.

> There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for anything.

Yes, but not all such "religions" are fashionable.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't -- Robert Benchley

Well, there are at least two kinds of people in the world then. -- cema

It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used [...]

I understand the point you are trying to make (energy consumption is an aggregate quantity so cannot be derived from instantaneous measurement), but of course it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car, and there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Sadly, it is often the over-bearing extremists that cause progress to be made.

> there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles is not something that can be achieved by will alone; it also requires the cooperation of physics.

First, the SUV could quite likely already do 50mpg if driven by a hypermiler, and maybe fitted with truck tires and a streamlining tail. But it would take twice as long to get back from the deer hunt, and it would be a bumpier and much less comfortable ride.

At a given speed with a given frontal area in a given density of air, though, you're really limited by how low you can get the drag coefficient, and at any speed you're limited by how low you can get the mass and rolling resistance.

On this subject, I highly recommend Chapter A, "Cars II", of Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/2...

it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car

That's partly true. But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.

Back in the 70's such folk agitated for the CAFE regulations governing fleet fuel efficiency. It's important to note that these standards applied to passenger cars, as they quite clearly cannot be applied to 18-wheelers.

We got cars of greater efficiency, and one of the changes that led to this was the demise of large family station wagons. However, the consumers still wanted a way to drag around their families. This led to the evolution of the minivan, and eventually to the SUV.

While I don't have nearly enough data to know whether the net effect was positive, it's clear that at least at the margin, the effect of the CAFE regulations was negative.

You can't fool the market. It always finds a way to route around obstacles.

But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.

You have some interesting speculation here but no evidence at all.

Growing up my family had a station wagon and a regular sedan. They had comparable gas mileage IIRC. I think station wagons were driven out of the market (heh) in part because people felt safer and more powerful in SUVs and when you're driving your family around, safety matters. I certainly knew a lot of people who got SUVs for hauling the family around specifically because the high altitude made them feel invincible and they assumed that the extra weight would help in crashes against smaller vehicles.

For whatever it's worth, I have an anecdote regarding safety in station wagons vs. SUVs. When I was young my little sister was almost killed in a car accident because she was in the back seat of a station wagon when they were rear-ended by an SUV. SUVs don't have the same bumper level that other cars do, so instead of impacting the designed crumple zone, the SUV rolled up into the back window of the station wagon. Another foot and she would have been decapitated.

Subsequently, I've seen a couple sources which corroborate this trend -- in high speed accidents between cars and SUVs the fatality rates where higher than two cars.

> You have some interesting speculation here but no evidence at all.

And you follow this assertion with more speculation without evidence. Interesting...

It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV

At times I wonder how much of the truck/SUV critique is really driven by environmental concerns. I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous. And I've raged at trucks and SUVs whose regular headlights completely blinded me because they're set two feet higher than a normal car's. That makes me wonder how many people are enraged about those vehicles but frame their critiques in environmental terms because you can't yell at someone you know because someone else who drives the same vehicle pissed you off, but you can yell at them about a more generalized harm like environmental pollution....

> I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous.

Not to mention how much worse it would be to end up in an accident with one of them.

Too many people think that SUVs are 'safe' because of stuff like this. They feel that they will buy it, it will be a 'tank,' and they can drive any-which-way, completely care-free (nevermind things like the higher center-of-gravity...).

I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....

I've never really understood why people get worked up over landfills. Digging a giant hole and filling it with trash is a perfectly rational solution. It isn't as if we're importing mass from space and converting it to trash...we're digging up stuff from the ground, using it for awhile, and then putting it back in a slightly different form. If we ever find a use for the styrofoam in landfills, we can mine it back out again.

I don't get worked up over landfills, but I do get worked up over all those bits of styrofoam that never make it into the landfills and hang out on the beach or in a park or wherever they happened to land - I'd greatly prefer those bits be replaced by something biodegradable.

According to this website (http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6) it takes at least 180 days for a corn-based cup to biodegrade in a compost. Biodegradable or not, it's probably more efficient to hire people to just clean up the trash periodically instead of hoping for a biodegradable solution.

And even more efficient yet if people throw out their trash. The point is that people don't hire workers to clean up trash where I see all of it.

Modern landfills can actually be used as an energy source to some extent:

"More recently, it has been recognized that this landfill gas represents a usable energy source. The methane can be extracted from the gas and used as fuel. In the North Wake County Landfill, a company collects the landfill gas, extracts the methane, and sells it to a nearby chemical company to power its boilers."

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...

Also who cares if the hybrid is more fuel efficient? If we all drove hybrids we'd pump the last liter of oil out of the ground 20 years later? Whippie!

If these people actually cared about the environment they'd buy a used car, or bike to work.

How would a used (as opposed to new) car help? Used cars tend to be old, so would have a lowe fuel consumption than newer cars. Surely the most fuel effecient are the newest cars?

Perhaps the rationale is that a used car requires no energy to manufacture.

This might be completely rational if there was an excess of perfectly good used cars out there, but there isn't. Cars hold their value incredibly well compared to almost any other consumer product. We're not talking about $30 DVD players. Any used car worth a damn will get sold and bought up. There is almost always someone willing to take up the slack and keep a car running for decades. Therefore, by buying a new car, you're simply decreasing the demand for used cars slightly and lowering their price, which will just mean that someone will just get a better deal.

The only way to effectively reduce carbon emissions on the production side is to drive less person-miles. Buying used or new doesn't change much.

That's cute - my 1981 Toyota Tercel still gets 35+ mpg.

I must disagree.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not poking fun at you per se, but the idea that our technology will 'always' trend toward more efficient engines is one that we've pretty much failed at until very recently, which is still arguable.

The eco-friendliness of a car does not come down to its MPG only. You also need to look at how much greenhouse (and other) gases come out from the combustion. New cars tend to do better.

But on the other hand, building a new car requires lots of energy, so maybe in the end we're better off driving old ones... ? It's all so complex, I don't know what to think, personally!

If we're talking about greenhouse gases, then MPG is the only important measure. For one, the vast majority of the gases coming out of the tailpipe are going to be CO2 and H2O (aside from pre-existing constituents of the atmosphere). All of the other gases aren't going to have a significant impact on the greenhouse effect.

So to a very close first approximation: MPG = carbon emission per mile = greenhouse impact per mile.

Indeed, a more polluting vehicle (say a really dirty old diesel engine) would if anything have less of an effect on the greenhouse. Since it's particulate emissions would promote an offsetting cooling effect.

Are you certain about that? I know a car emits much more CO2 and H2O than most anything else, but as an example, I was pretty sure the smog over L.A. was a direct result of oxides of nitrogen. Or was that only toxic, and not greenhouse, and thus not part of our consideration?

According to http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05004.htm cars also produce significant amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, which are both greenhouse gases. However good old CO2 represents 94-95 percent of the greenhouse potential from your average car.

So no, it is not all CO2, but the rest is a rounding error.

Precisely. If you're talking about greenhouse impact, MPG is the only important measure.

If you're cared about pollution aside from that then yes, there are huge differences depending on make, model, maintenance, etc.

Should the water vapour also be an important part of your cars greenhouse gases?

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_va...)

Nitrogen oxides are both toxic and greenhouse gases, but in the quantities that they're emitted from tailpipes, the toxicity is a much bigger problem than the greenhouse effect.

Pft, the pistons in that car were about as big as a coke can, and there were four of them, plus it had a recirculating exhaust system.

It was also mostly made out of aluminium, much to the chagrin of my parents / loved ones.

In the US at least, efficiency improvements over the last decade or two have generally been offset by safety and performance improvements. Modern engines are more efficient, but they're also more powerful and they're driving heavier vehicles that are more likely to keep you alive in a crash. Americans drive on highways a lot and the need to be able to accelerate through an on-ramp quickly enough to feel safe has lead to cars with less net fuel efficiency than we might have.

A used car has already been created which is different from buying a new car every time which takes an insane amount of energy to create.

Any pointers for the "insane amount of energy"? I vaguely remember the local tech/car newspaper writing that after something like two years of driving (used 80s car v.s. brand new efficient car) the new car has spent less energy per kilometer. Or was it even less...

You can get an approximate answer by looking at the cost of the car. A new car costs say $30,000. Gas costs $2.75/gallon, so a new car is equivalent to about 10,000 gallons of gas.

It'll take a very very long time to recoup that.

The cost is not all energy though, so at best that is an upper limit. Furthermore there are cheaper sources of energy than gasoline (eg coal), so it is not even an upper limit.

What I hear most often is 80% of the energy consumed by a typical car is used during the manufacturing process.

It's also worth noting that many 80's cars got very good gas mileage. My first car, an '86, got low 30's, and with a tune-up some owners got higher than 35. So, be wary of the studies you read comparing new car mpg to old car mpg. My car got better or equal gas mileage compared to everything but hybrids like the Prius and Insight, and those are not representative of modern cars. I would bet the studies you have been reading have been comparing Insights (70mpg, and actually made since 1999) to 80's Corvettes (14mpg) or something along those lines.

The Prius is not particularly effective.

"A California-oriented paper http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3986_CAautocar...

states that direct tailpipe emission of CO2 accounts for 68% of the average vehicle lifecycle carbon emissions, with 21 percent linked to production and delivery of fuel, and 11 percent are due to manufacturing, including materials production."

So 11%. Pretty far off.

You're talking about CO2; he's talking about energy.

Two completely different things!

> I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials

Citation? I don't think I've ever lived somewhere that accepted styrofoam in curbside recycling, so I'm a bit skeptical.

I don't have the original one on hand. The research I encountered was done at the University of Victoria back in the 1980s, and I learned about it while I was a student there.

However I just looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_cup#Environmental_impact which has the comment, Paper cups may consume more non-renewable resources than cups made of polystyrene foam (whose only significant effluent is pentane). which includes two citations for the fact.

Toronto does take styrofoam in it's recycling program now. Though I've never seen that done anywhere else...

My father works in recycling. You can recycle styrofoam, but all you can make out of it is packing peanuts. Styrofoam cups aren't exactly a sustainable solution.

As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute

The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home.

edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.

This discussion took place in Michigan. For a substantial fraction of the year you really don't want to ride a bike there. And 2 miles is long enough that walking is inconvenient.

In any case the guy in the conversation wasn't the wannabe environmentalist. He just didn't like being harassed about the impact of his lifestyle choices by a hypocrite who was demonstrably far less environmentally friendly. (But who thought she was doing her bit.)

In other word it was a standard beam/mote discussion.

Does Michigan have worse weather than Bergen? The wettest city in Norway, situated 6° south of the Arctic circle? I'm willing to bet not.

Bergen has seen a boom in percentage of trips made by bike since they instituted a program to make the city more friendly to that mode of transportation.

Cities being designed around the automobile are by far the biggest thing standing in the way of the uptake of everyday cycling, not the weather.

Comparing the descriptions of climate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen#Climate and http://www.city-data.com/states/Michigan-Climate.html, yes. Michigan has a worse climate for biking. Particularly in the portions that are subject to lake-effect snow.

I don't really understand why Europeans think they have harsh weather. Despite their relatively northern position, water currents and conditions actually produce a calming effect for the majority of Europe (excluding Russia and some of the westerly former soviet satellites). Recently someone asked the same question for a city in Sweden, but I noted that even Chicago has a slightly lower average winter temperature and a much higher average summer temperature. Whatever you do, don't underestimate Minnesota! (I say from experience :().

P.S. Yeah, I know you Canadians have it rough, I feel for you.

P.S. Yeah, I know you Canadians have it rough, I feel for you.

Actually I grew up in Victoria, BC. The climate there is very mild for similar reasons to why much of Europe is. I didn't experience nasty weather until I moved to New Hampshire.

Does Bergen have ice on bike paths for much of the year? My dad traveled to Bergen when he was in his 60s, but I have never been there. Here in Minnesota (which has a climate similar to Michigan), a big barrier to biking or walking outdoors for shopping or commuting (which I do a lot) is the presence of ice on the streets. In places with a freeze-thaw cycle repeatedly during the winter (and Minnesota is one of those places) streets can be covered with ice on random occasions during six months of the year.

Some Minnesotans fly to Arizona every winter to avoid the icy streets here. They are called "snowbirds" locally. I used to think that was an extravagant lifestyle, but when my dad was not quite seventy-two years old, in April in Minnesota, he slipped on ice while on a trip to the local grocery store and then was paralyzed (quadriplegic) for the last six years of life, unable to care for himself at all. Since then, I have taken icy streets much more seriously. I still bike a lot, and I still stay in Minnesota during the winter, but I realize now that walking or biking on ice can have catastrophic consequences.

I agree with the idea that designing a city to be more bike-friendly increases bike trips. I enjoy where I live now because my city has an extensive set of city bike trails (which in the winter are sometimes used by Nordic skiers) that connect to regional trails (former railroad lines) that extend all over our metropolitan area. But I watch out for ice for half of each year.

I clearly shouldn't have underestimated Michigan's climate. I haven't been to Bergen, but I've been in Minneapolis in winter (it was -20 °C). I wouldn't have cycled there due to the bad infrastructure, not due to the weather.

Anyway, aside from those two cities the main reason people don't cycle has been shown time and time again to be lack of infrastructure, not the weather. Just look at other places with the same climate as The Netherlands, or Bergen. Clearly the common factor isn't the weather.

It's also a much bigger factor than people imagine. I've lived in Iceland which often has these sort of glassy ice conditions an -5 °C, and I'd much prefer it to otherwise equivalent weather at 20 °C somewhere else.

The cold allows you to push harder without being sweaty, and I've found that in mixed terrain cycling on ice with studded tires is a lot safer than on no ice. It's a lot easier to slip on loose gravel than it is to slip on ice when your tires have a dozen nails sticking into the ice.

I bike year round in Michigan. (In Grand Rapids, specifically.) My commute is about 4 1/2 miles.

There is a fair amount of cyclists here, but not that many ride in the winter.

That may be true, but I believe the point is not that the Truck-driver couldn't do more (Sure, he could.. Switching to a car would be better), but to show that the car owner was not considering things logically and considering that the ramifications of her own choices.

Indeed, the most eco-strident person I know a) lives in a huge house full of consumer crap b) flies all the time on business to c) Dubai, where she is part of the indoor-skislope-in-the-desert economy.

She was vegan for a bit which I suppose might count for a little, then her therapist told her it was OK to eat meat so she started again...

A complaint I hear quite a lot is that people in the west are so decadent, they throw away a perfectly good mobile phone every two years and buy a new one. But, I mean, mobile phones are tiny. They don't use up that much material. Sometimes it seems the activities targeted by environmentalists has more to do with how much people like them rather than how much energy they consume. Killjoyism.

I think it might be helpful to be specific about who is making this claim. Is it a major environmental organization like the Sierra Club? A highly regarded university research group that studies sustainability? An environmental think tank? Or some random crank on the street?

There are lots of crazy or ignorant people in the world who say crazy or ignorant stuff. It doesn't necessarily make sense to ascribe every self-described environmentalist's claims to all environmentalists. This seems like the real world version of nut-picking.

Well yes I was talking about street cranks. Like the original article is. I didn't mean to imply all environmentalism is like this.

They might be tiny, but electronics are extremely expensive in terms of environmental impact.

In terms of energy consumption alone, semiconductor manufacturing uses about 10^6 as much energy as metal craft, or 10^7 the one needed for plastics injection (per weight of finished product). Other key measures such as water consumption and pollution are in the same ballpark.

OF course, electronic gadgets are mostly made out of plastic pieces, and ICs are only a tiny fraction of the total weight, which is way we don't pay thousands of dollars for a cell phone. But the size of an object is normally not a good predictor of its environment impact.

A more accurate measure would be the retail price, but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium. You can do that by using the price of the cheapest competitor instead. This has the advantage of taking into account the energy needed for shipping and storage as well.

> but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium.

You don't have to take this into account, as the distortion just becomes more pollution. Chances are the brand premium ends up in the pockets of marketing and execs, who spend it. Any* time money is spent it eventually "generates" an equivalent amount of pollution.

* Assuming all regulations are equally applied to all manufactures.

I think you are right, but still... would prefer to keep the model simple.

The purpose of using the price as an indicator is to roughly estimate the inputs required to manufacture a product. Under that assumption, profit margins are noise.

Of course, profits are eventually expended, but so are the cost paid to suppliers, the taxes and so on. You would have to think about velocity of money and the overall macroeconomic effect. This is way overkill.

Or just take the limit as time->infinity and simplify it to price=pollution.

If you want this taken to the logical extreme, see http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf where it is argued that "using dollars = spending gasoline". As oil is the cheapest available energy source, everything eventually becomes oil burnt.