How much blood for oil?
"No blood for oil! No blood for oil!"
It's a nice, easy sentiment that can be rallied around. It plays well in the media, and it appeals to our outer good guys. Our inner bad guys, however, would probably trade our son's favorite toy to pay off our mortgage. Everything, even oil, has a price. How much oil is one gallon of blood really worth? And are we getting our blood's value? Let's take a quick look.
So, in a morbid bit of politics, the Obama administration values the dollar value of a single life at 6.1 million. (The EPA, by comparison, thinks you're worth %50 more than that.) The human body has only 1.5 gallons of blood inside of it, so that's 4 million dollars per gallon of blood. Gas just hit 4.60 dollars per gallon, for an exchange rate of 869,000 gallons of oil per gallon of blood. We can work with that number.
According to Wikipedia, in the past 11 years in the war on terror, the US has had 9,954 servicemen dead, 83,872 injured, 6 missing. That gives a total casualty figure of 93,832 people over the past 11 years, or 12,795 gallons of blood per year. So we should be getting 11,118,855,000 gallons of oil per year paid for in blood. As oil is commonly traded in 42-gallon barrels, that's 264,734,642 barrels of oil.
We consume 7 billion barrels of oil per yer. Our blood-paid stock should therefore cover about 3.7% of our oil usage. So the next time you're at the pump paying for $4.60 per gallon gas, give a thought to the people who gave their blood, so that it wouldn't cost $4.77.
It's a nice, easy sentiment that can be rallied around. It plays well in the media, and it appeals to our outer good guys. Our inner bad guys, however, would probably trade our son's favorite toy to pay off our mortgage. Everything, even oil, has a price. How much oil is one gallon of blood really worth? And are we getting our blood's value? Let's take a quick look.
So, in a morbid bit of politics, the Obama administration values the dollar value of a single life at 6.1 million. (The EPA, by comparison, thinks you're worth %50 more than that.) The human body has only 1.5 gallons of blood inside of it, so that's 4 million dollars per gallon of blood. Gas just hit 4.60 dollars per gallon, for an exchange rate of 869,000 gallons of oil per gallon of blood. We can work with that number.
According to Wikipedia, in the past 11 years in the war on terror, the US has had 9,954 servicemen dead, 83,872 injured, 6 missing. That gives a total casualty figure of 93,832 people over the past 11 years, or 12,795 gallons of blood per year. So we should be getting 11,118,855,000 gallons of oil per year paid for in blood. As oil is commonly traded in 42-gallon barrels, that's 264,734,642 barrels of oil.
We consume 7 billion barrels of oil per yer. Our blood-paid stock should therefore cover about 3.7% of our oil usage. So the next time you're at the pump paying for $4.60 per gallon gas, give a thought to the people who gave their blood, so that it wouldn't cost $4.77.
posted by Chris at
6:02 PM
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