What are the hidden costs of America's imported oil? The answer is complex. It may ultimately be unknowable. But this hasn't daunted the likes of Milton Copulos.

A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council Foundation--a right-of-center Washington think tank--Copulos spent 18 solid months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America's addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million each.)

Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his exhaustive findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this spring.

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?

Eight dollars a gallon.

When he isolated the hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the price jumped to $11. This included a war premium that swelled the Pentagon's spending to protect all Persian Gulf oil to $137 billion a year. In a truly transparent economy, by Copulos' math, filling up Rodriguez's Jeep would run about $230.

Consumers don't dodge the bill for all these masked expenditures. Instead, they pay for them indirectly, through higher taxes, or by saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt--one that's increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs of their oil habit, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their energy gluttony.

"Gas isn't too expensive," said Copulos. "It's way, way too cheap."

A Tank of Gas, A World of Trouble

From a security point of view US wars have become self sustaining.

A quick google and I come up with 19.6 million barrels of oil per day usage in the US. That works out to 18% of the US oil requirements are military.

_{aspiring to genteel poverty}

humans aren't smarter than yeast, let's face it....

not that yeast is stupid, but...

de, if you have time to read dnadir's diary, i hope you will.

it sorely needs some of your well-articulated wisdom...

fair and balanced, ya know

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Thanks for posting this article on how big a part.  

The Fates are kind.

you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

Let's see, 85 million bbls.day worldwide, and 3.5 million gallons day / 55 gallons/bbl. = 63,600 barrels/day for the wars.

63,600 divided into 85,000,000.  It's actually a rather small percentage of global oil consumption totals.  But it is close to 0.1%, which is pretty big as a percentage if we count it all as the consumption total of a single corporate consumer.

"Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world" -- John Lennon

We Had to Burn all the Oil in Order to Secure

Indeed, that was our conclusion one year ago in this diary.

The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)

WASHINGTON: The U.S. Air Force has decided to push development of a new type of fuel to power its bombers and fighters, mixing conventional jet fuel with nonpetroleum-based fuels that could eventually end military dependence on foreign sources of oil.

The plan, to be announced at the Paris Air Show, will open a contest between fuel refiners and alternative energy companies to produce a jet fuel composed of no more than 50 percent petroleum. Reflecting the importance that the U.S. government attaches to the initiative, the public announcement will be made by U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and U.S. Federal Aviation Administrator Marion Blakey.

"The goal is to certify the entire fleet by 2010 with a 50-50 mix," said Air Force Special Assistant Paul Bollinger who is coordinating the military shift to synthetic fuels.

As far as I know, the only 50/50 blend tested so far (with a B52 bomber all 8 engines) is based on gas and coal liquefaction (Fischer-Tropsch tech).

Any decision by the US air force will have a big impact on civil aviation. They are subsidising the the R&D by  ordering the first large deliveries for their tests.

I'll try to catch that announcement in Paris and see what their intentions are.
Just a bit scared that this news will be burried among the show and will be hard to find.

The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)

you are the media you consume.

It is now known that, during the filming of the 1958 Disney nature documentary WHITE WILDERNESS, the film crew induced the hapless lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.

Snopes.

Disney -- the enemy of all that lives.

The crony managers are really delusional, thinking that heaps of funny paper can solve them any problems at any time. They seem to be absolutely sure they know the right things and the "nature" of the world. Oh, human folly!

It also seems there are many ways to finance crony capitalism without the negatives of war.