Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
resulted
in a doubling of the average miles per gallon (mpg) of the
auto
oil embargo and when fully effective in
fleet from
mpg before the oil shock to about
.
mpg for cars and
rst
appliance energy standards were introduced in California
and resulted in much more ef
mpg for light trucks after it. The
cient appliances; for
example, refrigerators are larger today than in those days
but use much less energy (federal standards were not intro-
duced until
but manufacturers used the California
requirement nationwide). But the price of oil dropped
precipitously in
and with it came a drop in efforts to
improve ef
ciency. Supply was going up as more countries
began to export oil, and demand was dropping because of
increasing ef
ciency. OPECdecided that they were playing
a losing hand and lowered their prices.
This time it is different. We have a real supply crunch as
well as global warming to deal with. The developing world,
particularly China and India, has begun to move up the
economic ladder. World demand for fuel has increased
greatly: since
, according to the EIA, demand for oil
has been going up each year by about one million barrels
per day and reached
,
the price of oil has gone up, and demand for coal and
natural gas has resulted in large increases in their prices,
too. I amwriting this in January of
million barrels per day in
and the price of oil
hovers around
per barrel as it has for the past few
years. When I was in Iran in the spring of
$
, oil was
at about
$
per barrel. Their of
cials felt the proper price
based on demand was about
per barrel, and
the high price was due to speculation. The price has now
come down to that level. Thanks to the greed and incompe-
tence of the
$
to
$
financial sector of the world economy and
