Petrol, Gas, Fuel - Call It What You Will, We Are Its Hyper-Consumers

This about sums up my head scratchings of the last couple weeks/months (and years). This chart is based on 2003 data. At that time the U.S. had under 300 million people and consumed nearly 1.4 million litres (368,906 gallons) of gasoline each day. On the other side you have a sampling of countries that add up (by my quick estimate) to almost 3 billion people. Thats practically half the worlds population using less gasoline than the whole of the United States. This includes other western nations where it could be argued that standards of living and quality of life are better.

Four years on I would not be surprised that the bar on the right has overtaken the US indicator due to increases in domestic demand in countries such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, China, India, Russia and Iran - several of these countries subsidising gasoline to its citizens thereby alleviating the effects of increased per barrel oil prices.

The stats are no less shocking, however.

*Image is originally from the economist and taken from the oil drum.