Originally Posted by
lil brown bat
I seriously doubt it would even do that. Show of hands, who believes that if for one day per week (which is less than half the average working week), all working, commuting Americans (which is a lot less than all Americans, all of whom also consume petroleum in all kinds of ways) who drive to work (and also drive outside of work, and use petroleum in other ways too) were to commute by bicycle, it would cut petroleum imports from the Persian Gulf by half?
I'm guessing they're misstating it. They mean that one day per week of work commuting requires the persian gulf imports. If we rode bikes we'd need oil to feed ourselves the extra food and build the extra bikes and bike related toys. I'm sure it'd be less oil.
It doesn't seem like an unreasonable figure. We don't do a lot of persian gulf importing. The reason persian gulf oil is so dangerous is that when it disappears from the global market prices sky rocket. In order to solve that we'd have to stop importing and exporting oil and have our own internal oil market.
Being able to get by on our domestic oil supply would require sweeping change in transport, heating, farming, and material production. Simply eliminating transportation oil use would still leave us short.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/p...nt/import.html