Scientists and international types tend to spend at least a little time thinking about units of measure—feet versus meters, degrees centigrade versus degrees Fahrenheit, etc. But here's a cool proposal relayed from IEEE Spectrum, for my money one of the best science and tech publications in English.
The idea is to cut past all the different ways we measure energy output—BTUs, joules, kilowatt-hours, and a bunch of other stuff, all appropriate for certain kinds of energy under certain conditions. Instead a few researchers have realized that every year humanity consumes one cubic mile of oil every year. So they propose, as an equivalency, a new unit: the CMO. It's a cool idea, and—even though I'm a huge fan of alternative ways to generate energy, these numbers do put the current ideas into some context.
UPDATE Jan. 17 1:58 PM: Because you demanded it! A deeper explanation of the assumptions behind all the numbers below, from the same article.
