Thanks to These 100 Companies For Doing The Most To Keep Us Out of Medieval Subsistence Poverty and Misery
Apparently some environmental group put this together to shame (or perhaps violently target) these 100 companies but I read it completely differently. I would treat this as a map of the top 100 heroes that help separate us from past millennia of subsistence misery.
This morning I fueled up my car for about $3.00 a gallon or about $2.63 before taxes. That gasoline started as fuel miles below the ground, in some cases pumped from offshore platforms in a thousand feet of water. It flowed in ships and pipelines perhaps for thousands of miles. It was carefully broken down into fractions in a refinery and reformed almost molecule by molecule to meet the needs of drivers and regulatory authorities. It was distributed in trucks to thousands of gas stations like mine. In all, billions and billions of dollars of investment and 100+ years of human ingenuity were required to get it to my car. And they sold it to me for 66 cents a quart or less than the bottle of water I bought at the same station.
The one major change I would make to the chart is in the bottom line, which says "Country sizes depict cumulative CO2 emissions from 1850-2011." I would have said "Country sizes depict cumulative reductions in misery from 1850-2011" which, not coincidentally, map perfectly with cumulative CO2 emissions.
