Remodelling less.

It costs 8780 BTU of energy to produce $1 of GDP. 1BTU is 2.93*10^-4 kWh, which makes it about 2 kWh per dollar. The 200,000 MWh/day is then about $100 million/day in energy costs, or $36.6 billion/year.

Now let's ask the oracle for a suitable industry... Voila - remodeling is a $158 billion industry - almost 5 times more than extra oil from drilling would provide, just keep those old countertops.

Walking an extra mile.

Average fuel consumption of the main mode of transportation in the US is (21.5 + 17.2)/2 = 19.35MPG. Assuming that at least one person in those 100 million+ households works and thus drives to/from work, if the said person would just leave his or her car half a mile away from the worksite, the country as a whole would drive 111,162,259 miles less per day, saving 111,162,259 / 19.35 = 5,744,820 gallons of gas daily.

Knowing that there are 36.6kwh of energy in each gallon of gasoline, the 5,744,820 gallons would translate into 210,260MWh/day - exactly the same amount that offshore drilling would produce.

And we haven't even included the health benefits for mile-a-day walking and booming convenience store businesses (so nice to drink something cold while walking!). Definitely worth looking into!

Shooting less bullets

With 200 million firearms in the country, and assuming the owners shoot them weekly for training purposes using a 50pcs box of ammo, let's see what we can achieve by reducing the number of shots by 2 per day (50 per week => ~7/day goes to 5/day). Equaling the energy release to well-publicized muzzle energy (total energy released is of course much higher and is spent on crawling though the barrel and operating the gun's mechanics (if any)), let's settle at 500J per bullet.

1000J per day for 200 million guns is 200,000,000,000 joules, which is 55MWh/day. Meh.

Recycling a read newspaper.

The 100 largest newspapers print about 36 million copies daily. The figure in that article is the highest daily circulation during a 6 month period, so let's say on the average there are 20 million copies printed - just about a half of the maximum.

If 3 newspapers weigh roughly a pound, 6000 newspapers comprise 1 ton of paper. As recycling a ton of paper saves 4000 kwh of electricity, recycling the 20 million newspapers would save about 13,332MWh/day of energy. Together with bathroom+TV that is about 1/6th of what drilling would add.

This is not taking into account the 23,331,000 gallons of water that would be saved every day because of recycling vs making new paper.

1 hour less of TV

In addition to less bathroom reading, if we get 1 hour of TV less per day and assuming an average TV consumes 70 watts, together with less bathroom reading we'd get 90 watts savings per household, so bathroom+TV equals about 20,000MWh/day.

Even if that still doesn't add up to 200,000MWh/day, that is 1/10th of that, meaning less oil rigs, less greenhouse gases emissions and less oil-covered beaches. What's not to like!

Not having dead dogs.

There are 61 million dogs in the US, and if the population is fairly constant 1/365th of that number dies every day to be replenished by newly born ones. 1/365th of 61 million is 167,000, and if average mass is 10 kilograms, total mass would be 1,670,000 kilograms. According to the famous E=mc^2 formula if we are to not have that mass (like merge them with anti-dogs or something), that would be 500,653,404,860,000 joules of energy, or 139,000MWh, every day. Not quite, but very close.

P.S. Soylent green!

Reducing bathroom reading.

Let's say the combined power of bathroom lighting/ventilation is 100 watts. Let's also assume 0.4 hours (24 minuts) of bathroom reading per household. Reducing that to 0.2 hours (12 minutes) per day would free 100W * 0.2h = 20Wh per household, per day. With 111,162,259 households, that adds up to 2,223,245,180 Watt-hours per day, or 2,223 MWh/day.

This is about a 10th of what offshore drilling would provide, but of course, 200,000MWh/day is likely to be very inflated figure, because that energy is just unharnessed released when burning, while the 2,223MWh/day of savings from bathroom reading is in the form of usable electricity. Anyway, the issue of bathroom reading is worth looking into.