According to David O’Reilly the CEO of CHEVRON, the world currently consumes oil at a rate of about 40,000 US gallons per second. He says, “the scale of the energy system is enormous.”
So, I did some math.
1 barrel of oil = 42 US gallons
1 cubic meter = 264.172052 US gallons
According to the 2008 World Fact-book, the world currently consumes about 85,270,000 barrels of oil per day.
85,270,000 barrels per day x 42 US gallons per barrel = 3,581,340,000 US gallons per day = 149,222,500 US gallons per hour = 2,487,042 US gallons per minute = 41,451 US gallons per second.
So, Mr. O’Reilly was right when he said that the world consumes about 40,000 US gallons of oil per second.
41,451 US gallons of oil per second = approximately 157 cubic meters of oil per second.
Imagine a river of oil.
I thought it might interesting to see just how much oil we are talking about here, so I compared the amount of oil that we are currently burning in the world to the amount of water that flows in various waterfalls.
I used average yearly flow rate figures.
The flow rate of Jog Falls is about 153 cubic meters per second, a little less than our imaginary river of oil.
You can see what 153 cubic meters per second looks like here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU0CjwPVfrw
Now imagine it on fire with black smoke billowing into the air.
To adamantly insist that this couldn’t be effecting the environment is irrational.