Los Angeles

Which Counties Have the Biggest Oil Addiction Problem? We Still Don’t Know.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “What I really need is a map showing what U.S. counties use the most gasoline, so that I can target my sustainability efforts there?” Funny, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club were thinking the same thing. What they came up with gets us partway there.

By Tanya Snyder

2:36 PM EDT on September 28, 2012

“We were curious about which geographic areas were most oil dependent, and thus, driving the country’s oil addiction the most,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC in his blog post. So they made this map of 2010 oil consumption by county.

It has the potential to be a useful tool, especially for groups like these that might be trying to figure out where to concentrate their field organizing efforts. But the map doesn’t tell us quite enough to be useful. This chart they made of the top ten gasoline consuming counties is a little more revealing:

Tanya Snyder

Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Los Angeles | Oil

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