I would certainly like to the see the EIA publish energy statistics in metric. However, I just skimmed (it is over 400 pages) the 2007 Annual Energy Review. They do a decent job in the overview section and in the renewable energy section comparing all sources in quadrillions of BTUs per year. The exact same point as you are making (wind and solar is tiny fraction of total renewables, doubling total renewables by only increasing wind and solar is unfeasible) can be made from the presented data uniformly shown in quadrillions of BTUs (per year). Politicians say dumb things all the time. In this case, I don't think it can be blamed on the government data. Some of the other chapters on coal, oil, etc, do bog down in incomparable mass and volume units, but they include a column for quadrillions of BTUs. --- On Tue, 5/5/09, Stan Jakuba <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Stan Jakuba <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:45019] Letter to ed To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, May 5, 2009, 9:49 PM The Mechanical Engineering magazine published an excerpt from the letter I had posted here earlier. Unfortunately, the published version, while promoting metric, omitted the metric numbers. Here is the MSWord version of the original. It has been my experience with most publications that they resent numbers ("we do not want to confuse our readers" (!)). Maybe my engineering background makes me think that numbers are more useful than adjectives such as huge, expensive, skyrocketing, ..... that one reads and hear endlessly. But I do agree that numbers in I-P units can indeed be confusing. :-) Stan Jakuba
