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Whether Americans are math-phobic, lazy or just plain innumerate-- illiterate with numbers-- the results are the same: Americans do not know what they ought to know and could know with just a little simple math. There are a few different kinds of these calculations. Feel free to use a calculator if you must.
The first, that everybody should be doing on a regular basis, is the really simple kind where you're given the two or three numbers and all you have to do is combine them. For example, a Billion-dollar Central Corridor light rail system that serves 42,000 riders is costing the taxpayers $1B/42,000 = $23,810 per rider just to build. You could buy each of them a nice new car for that, and the taxpayers would not have to subsidize the ongoing operation.
Then there's the math that is a bit more complex, but still easy enough, since you know all the numbers. For example, you COULD take the $50 million projected annual operating subsidy and give these riders free gasoline, too. Just divide $50 million by 42,000 cars, divide by $4 per gallon (to get gallons), multiply by the 20-mile daily round trip and divide by 20 miles per gallon (that's a wash), and you see that every rider could drive FREE (that is, on the taxpayer's dime) for 297 days per year. There are generally only 250 work days per year.
Obvious conclusion: Light rail costs too much to build and too much to run. It's a very bad and excessively costly solution.
Then there is the kind of math that is similarly easy, but requires you to actually look up some of the numbers you need. The example here is to compute what percentage of the atmosphere is manmade CO2, to see how big of a problem human-caused CO2 really is. Multiply the percentage of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere by the percentage of greenhouse gas that is CO2, and multiply that by the percent of CO2 that is manmade. You'll get a number something like 8/1000 of 1% or 0.00008! Now, assuming we do something radical and cut our CO2 output by HALF, we'll have changed the atmosphere by 0.004% for the better! Whoopee!
Obvious conclusion: Global warming believers can't, or won't, do math.
The best kind of math, though, is when you let a real expert get after it. "Professor David J C MacKay of the Cambridge University Department of Physics holds a PhD in computation from Cal Tech and a starred first in Physics, so we can take it that he knows his numbers. And, as he points out, "numbers are typically lacking in current discussion around carbon emissions and energy use." In his book, he computes what several "solutions" to global warming-- eliminating fossil fuels-- would mean for the UK. Assuming we choose NOT to utilize the large coal and oil reserves we have, the results for the US should be similar. Here are a few highlights:
-"To provide one quarter of our current energy consumption by growing energy crops, for example, would require 75% of Britain to be covered with biomass plantations." [We could run our refrigerators, but have nothing to put in them.]
-"[I]f economic constraints and public objections are set aside, it would be possible for the average European energy consumption of 125 kWh/d per person to be provided from these country-sized renewable sources. The two hugest contributors would be photovoltaic panels, which, covering 10% of the country, would provide 50 kWh/d per person; and offshore wind farms, which, filling a sea area twice the size of Wales, would provide another 50 kWh/d per person on average." [Note: these would require that every lake and loch in the UK (and large stretches of England's famous seaside cliffs) be converted to pumped storage facilities for calm and cloudy days AND every automobile would have to be electric, and act as a giant storage battery for this inconstant energy.]
-"[C]overing the windiest 10% of Britain with onshore windfarms yields 20 kWh per day per person; covering every south-facing roof with solar water-heating panels captures 10 kWh per day per person; and wave machines intercepting Atlantic waves over the entire 1000-km western coastline provide 4 kWh per day per person."
- This physicist is definitely a believer in global warming and generally opposed to nuclear energy, but... "Even MacKay admits that fast breeders and oceanic uranium together would power the entire human race at hoggish American levels for well over a thousand years, or at current European consumption for several millenia. He also says that known thorium reserves, used with current tech, would run the whole race at rich-westerner levels for several decades. There’s also a thing called a thorium energy amplifier reactor which would be a lot more efficient. If it works as its Nobel prize-winning designers predict, known thorium reserves would run six billion people at American luxury for sixty thousand years." And of course, we don't have to fill every inch of the land and sea with reactors.
The now-obvious conclusion: There is no such thing, realistically speaking, as "alternative energy" unless you include nuclear, and no reason to pursue it unless you believe that we would be certainly doomed by burning the coal and oil Mother Nature gave us. Fundamentally, though, you shouldn't even be concerned about that "global warming" nonsense if you just do the math on THAT.
Which brings us to the kind of math that every thinking person ought to be able to do: performing a reality check when politicians start throwing numbers at you. For example, Obama says we could save as much oil as we could drill by inflating our tires properly. Assuming that NONE of us do that now, knowing that proper inflation adds 3% to mileage and transportation uses 70% of our 18 million bbl/day consumption, you find that we could save up to 378,000 barrels per day just with air. But ANWR alone could provide us with a million barrels/day, the outer continental shelf 3 or 4 times that, and the oil shales at least as much more. In other words, Barack is either hopelessly ignorant or a con man and liar, neither of which is a recommendation for the high office he seeks. Look around and you will find that politicians are often the most innumerate among us. Don't be fooled. Do the math.
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