A short excerpt from journalist Paul Salopek’s Pulitzer Prize-worthy article A Tank Of Gas, A World Of Trouble:
What are the hidden costs of America’s imported oil? The answer is complex. It may ultimately be unknowable. But this hasn’t daunted the likes of Milton Copulos.
A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council Foundation–a right-of-center Washington think tank–Copulos spent 18 solid months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America’s addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million each.)
Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his exhaustive findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this spring.
The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?
Eight dollars a gallon.
Salopek, Paul. “A Tank Of Gas, A World Of Trouble.” Chicago Tribune 29 Jul 2006.
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