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Saviolo
Saviolo's Journal
Saviolo's Journal
April 21, 2014
Americans have no idea where their oil comes from, in one chart
From a story on Vox: http://www.vox.com/2014/4/21/5636522/americans-oil-imports-chart-middle-east-canada
You can hardly blame Americans for believing that the vast majority of our oil imports come from the Middle East. Ever since the 1973 oil crisis, when Middle Eastern countries refused to sell oil to the United States as punishment for backing Israel in that year's Arab-Israeli war, the American political conversation has dominated by calls for "weening ourselves off of MidEast oil." What most Americans don't know is that we've mostly succeeded.
The University of Texas, as part of its annual energy poll, asked Americans where they think US oil comes from. A staggering 58 percent of Americans think that our top source of foreign oil is Saudi Arabia and another 15 percent say it's Iraq nearly three quarters of Americans. Meanwhile, only a tiny share 15 percent of Americans think we get most of our oil imports from Canada or Mexico. But the truth is almost the exact opposite: we get far more oil from our North American neighbors than we do from the Middle East:
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