Statistics of CO2 usage.

My dad wrote this to me:

I’m musing about “carbon footprints” in light of this highly misleading Greenpeace “graph” (lies, damn lies, and statistics):

Talk about “inflating” your statistics. Balloons, being roughly spherical, increase in volume as the CUBE of the radius. It’s dishonest to use the height of 3D objects to represent a linear graph, and plays on the innumeracy of a large portion of the population. It smacks of subliminal manipulation.

It would be more accurate to compare GDP vs. CO2 emissions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions

You’ll notice that the United States comes up in the middle.

Sometimes it’s good to be in the middle. Here’s a mileage vs. speed chart for a typical automobile. In this car you’ll go the furthest on a tank of gas at about 40mph, and always remember, you can’t do worse than zero, which is what you’re getting when you’re at a stop light (or living in Chad):

To put it all in perspective, the United States feeds hundreds of millions of people worldwide with what is probably the most efficient agricultural production industry in the world, and fossil fuels are an absolute necessity for the production of that food.

Screw that up and people will starve.