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Giant Sucking Sound: The Energy Counter

Posted by Clark Williams-Derry

05/02/2006 01:15 PM

Oil and natural gas siphon billions from the Northwest economy.

A point that bears repeating: Washington, Oregon, and Idaho produce virtually no natural gas, and absolutely no petroleum. So virtually every dollar the region spends on oil and gas gets immediately siphoned out of the region's economy -- which leaves less money circulating locally, among the region's residents and businesses.

The recent energy price spikes made me wonder: how much money is that, exactly? It's hard to say, exactly, since prices and imports are in constant flux. But in round numbers, it's about $17 billion per year: $9.6 billion in Washington, $5.2 in Oregon, and $2.1 billion in Idaho.

That's about $1,500 per person per year; and about $537 each second.

And if you have javascript enabled on your computer, you can see the numbers rack up below:

Dollars sent out of the Northwest states for oil and gas, year to date, 2006
Total, NW states:	0
Washington:	0
Oregon:	0
Idaho:	0

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Comments

Posted by ethan 05/05/2006 11:40 PM

Let us just add to that Biodiesel and Ethanol. From the pure economical sense it appears we are producing far less of these as we could be to help offset the economic issue area. We are so far behind in this region right now compared to other parts of the country and the world. France is a leader in biodiesel and the midwest was far ahead of us in production the last time I checked. There are reasons for all of this but this could and should change partially thanks to the Washington state government's actions. Let us be both an environmental leader and net exporter of energy in the future!

Posted by tld_enc 08/14/2006 01:59 AM

I would like to present the dollars sent out of the NW states information to a community solar outreach forum this Saturday. Is there a way to have the clicking dollars in a display format without the other articles?