Thanks for this. Awesome reference material. It's the kind of thing we keep trying to put into words, "Hey Humans!! You're dumber than your cats!!"

To segue from Joe's comment, the entire System of systems is perched on top of the Perception of Perpetual Growth, and that perception has been groomed (intentionally or not...mostly not) so that Big Money gets bigger and the land gets smaller. Populations of rich countries are placed where they are useless to anything but money, dependent on Big Money, and the Big Money has no overarching goal except serving more uselessness (consumptionism).

As we contemplate the fossil fuel problem, the CO2 problem, and what can be done going forward, we can start to get a perspective by looking at the wasted work of petroleum products, rather than just counting the dollars spent and oil barrels.

1 gallon of gasoline is worth at least 100 manhours of physical work. We pay less than $5 for that.

Where does all of that work go? It goes to moving steel and rubber back and forth to places that need neither steel or rubber.

It goes to lighting up cities and flying people around to places that already have enough people. It goes to heating houses with poor insulation and a couple of warm bodies in them, when better insulated homes could be heated with a small group of bodies living together.

It goes to making plastic that gets stuck in a hole in the ground.

Politicians keep telling us that they have to kiss the oil companies' asses because of "demand" by consumers.

Demand for what, exactly?

Apparently, it's a demand for wasting stuff.