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Lovins 15 (2:31)
Topic(s): Environment / Foreign Oil
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Video Transcript

When you're driving along in your car, you may not realize what's happening as a consequence of your stepping on the gas. You are pulling oil out of the ground somewhere, three-fifths of it from overseas. So there's this enormous infrastructure devoted to sucking up oil and refining it and shipping it to you, you know there's these 12, 15, whatever, giant tankers coming into the US every day laden with oil and ultimately it ends up at your neighborhood dealer where you don't need to think much, you just stick in your credit card and get the gas out of the pump.

And then, of course, coming out of your tail pipe are all those carbon molecules, carbon dioxide molecules. Those go up in the air—they'll stay there for about one hundred years messing up the climate. And there are other pollutants as well. Cars are a lot cleaner than they use to be, but they still cause a lot of illness and death for many because of the air pollution.

And then there are- there is the epidemic of deaths and injuries from car accidents. This is a bigger killer than breast cancer. If it were classed as a disease; we would devote a lot more effort to solving it.

And then you think about where your money goes when you put your credit card in the pump. And it- you may think it goes to the oil companies, but actually the oil companies, although right now they're making a lot of money, they only own six percent of the world's oil reserves. Ninety-four percent are owned by governments, including, in particular, quite a lot of governments that don't like us and have very different values and objectives than we do. Some of your oil money is going directly to armed people who are trying to kill us. And a lot of the rest is going around the world to create corruption, instability, militarization; this is called the oil disease in the development business.