Finding the carbon footprint of wine...

This story about the carbon footprint of wine contains an interesting map at the bottom.

Essentially it cuts the US into two. West of this line it's more carbon efficient to drink Napa Valley wines. East of the line it's more carbon efficient to drink French wines. Carbon efficiency refers to the energy and pollution creted from shipping this wine from it's source.

This "grape divide" must also have other implications. Think of all of the technology from California, or the films for that matter. Does it take less energy to watch French films on the East Coast than it does to watch Hollywood films?

Embodied Energy in a bottle of water

Pablo Paster writes a great look at the lifecycle cost of a bottle of water. This is a great look at how one would roughly look at the energy embodied in our products.

The biggest impact comes from the plastic bottle. Since plastic is made from oil, it requires energy (oil) to produce it. Since our water standards are so high in this country, the quality of these bottled waters is not much better than what comes out of our tap.

The costs of various liquids...

Great article on the cost of gasoline alongside other liquids.

Compared with Snapple, whiteout, and Pepto Bismol ($123.20/gallon), gasoline is surprisingly inexpensive.

"$21.19 for WATER - and the buyers don't even know the source. No wonder Evian spelled backwards is Naive."

Of course, the writer fails to mention the TRUE COSTS of gasoline, and the enormous subsidies our government provides for it.

What are our Priorities?

According to the National Priorities Project, the COST OF IRAQ WAR is:
$11 million per hour,
$275 million per day,
TOTAL: $406,592,561,811 and counting

According to The Census Bureau there are 111,162,000 households in the US.

If the average energy efficiency upgrade for a home is $10,000, then we could insulate EVERY HOME in the US in just 10 hours...

...with just the money we spend each day on the war.

We import 13.15 million barrels of oil per day.
By doing these energy efficiency upgrades, we could save 15% of that, or some 2 million barrels a day.

That is more oil than we import from Saudi Arabia (about 1.5 million barrels/day).

Imagine being free of Saudi Arabian oil.

The Oil We Eat (Literally!)

The Oil We Eat
Following the food chain back to Iraq