So how willing are we to help?

It's been a while since I've blogged, mostly because I've been feeling sad about things. Of course I'm still missing my Pip, but that sense of loss, while still there, has lessened a bit. But I think my sadness now is coming from several things. The oil spill and the damage it's doing is never far from my heart. But I've also come across a story about child sacrifices in Uganda. The problem is serious enough that they had a form a anti-child sacrifice task force to help curb the problem. Then there's the story of a 15 year old girl that was raped by a member of the girl's church, which is bad enough. But then the leaders of the church made the girl get up in front of the congregation and apologize for being raped. She was also told not to press charges because a good christian should forgive. The man wasn't made to apologize. I think we need the white haired Susan someone (Pounder, Pointer I can't remember) to come back and start yelling "STOP THE INSANITY!!!!!!!!!!" again.

So, in my small way to try to make a difference, here's an excerpt from the blog of Bill Finch. He is the director of conservation for The Nature Conservancy in Alabama, is blogging for Cool Green Science about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the Conservancy’s efforts in Alabama to protect shellfish reef restoration projects there from the coming slick. Again, I would ask how willing are you to do something to make a difference? The following is from Bill Finch's blog:


If you want to do something right now, do it with these numbers in mind:

59 gallons: Average volume of motor vehicle gasoline used, per person per year, in Europe.

428 gallons: Motor vehicle gasoline used, per person per year, in the United States.

620%: Percentage by which U.S. gasoline usage for vehicles exceeds that of Europe.

9.989 million barrels: Amount of oil used for gasoline each day in the United States.

1.8 million barrels of oil: Amount of oil saved each day if U.S. gasoline consumption were only 500% greater than consumption in Europe.

1.75 million barrels of oil: Amount of oil produced each day by all offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

So, great: We could eliminate the equivalent of the Gulf of Mexico’s oil production if we reduced our driving so that we only used 5 times, rather than 6.2 times, as much gasoline for motor vehicle travel as Europeans do.

But we wouldn’t want to set a goal for ourselves that would require real sacrifice, would we? So how painful would it be to reduce our gasoline consumption by 20 percent?

Look at these numbers:

190 miles: Average miles driven, per person per week, in the United States.

5.4 miles: Average number of miles per day we’d have to reduce our driving to eliminate dependency on oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico.

38 miles: Average number of miles per week we’d have to reduce our driving.

Some drive more, some less. Watch your odometer to see how many miles you drive, and what your 20 percent cut looks like.

With these numbers, and seeing the devastation being caused, I'm not quite so eager to get another car!