Carbon Shoe Size Comparisons

I love my vibrams. just like barefoot. ease into running though to allow calves to adjust.

For me, its not so much that they don’t live the lifestyle they preach to others. For me its that they holler about rising seal levels, desert expansion, crop failure, cut your CO2 if not for yourself for your grandchildren. Now I ask, if they truly believed their own rhetoric, why aren’t they, with all their wealth, buying up high altitude properties in northern climes? If not for themselves, what of their grandchildren? Why aren’t northern universities over whelmed with applications from climate researchers who want to move themselves and their families to a safer place? Am I to understand that they, who know more about the disaster they foretell than anyone, don’t care about securing some sort of future for their grandchildren?
I would hate to think that such public figures, leaders of society and science both, have so little regard for their own kin. In fact, I hate thinking that so much that I just won’t. It would be much nicer of me to believe that they just don’t believe themselves.

“Mowing the lawn (1hr, gas engine push mower) 9.7”
Of course, an additional 30lbs CO2 exhaled by the pusher of the mower! (I prefer my ride-on)

Layman’s question here: How can you get 19.4 pounds of carbon from a gallon of gasoline that weighs far less than that?

Sorry, just answered my own question with some help from Google:
from: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/co2.shtml
“It seems impossible that a gallon of gasoline, which weighs about 6.3 pounds, could produce 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) when burned. However, most of the weight of the CO2 doesn’t come from the gasoline itself, but the oxygen in the air.
When gasoline burns, the carbon and hydrogen separate. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water (H2O), and carbon combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2).
A carbon atom has a weight of 12, and each oxygen atom has a weight of 16, giving each single molecule of CO2 an atomic weight of 44 (12 from carbon and 32 from oxygen).
Therefore, to calculate the amount of CO2 produced from a gallon of gasoline, the weight of the carbon in the gasoline is multiplied by 44/12 or 3.7.
Since gasoline is about 87% carbon and 13% hydrogen by weight, the carbon in a gallon of gasoline weighs 5.5 pounds (6.3 lbs. x .87).
We can then multiply the weight of the carbon (5.5 pounds) by 3.7, which equals 20 pounds of CO2!”
I got a C in high school chemistry and that was a long time ago!

When Al Gore gave a talk in Manila about 5 months ago, he emphasized, “we must put a price on carbon.” He means of course, “you have to buy carbon credits from our carbon trading companies and banks.” A Filipino climate official/bureaucrat who gave a talk in NYC early this week posted in his facebook status, that many of the audience in their conference are bankers and carbon traders. They’re still hoping for mega-billion $ from carbon cap and trade.

Perhaps the gasoline poundage accounts for the costs of extraction, refining, transportation, and punitive taxation. Much as the Indian Entourage Odyssey figure does not account for the positive effect of having the many non-productive busy bodies in a different hemisphere for a few short days.
Think climatology math – not your normal math. The following guide may help:
1. Select result
2. Create supporting evidence
3. Broadcast
(Top secret information obtained from the UEA)

Who really cares about carbon emissions?
As I believe Nonoy was alluding to, those who can profit from it.

Billy Ruff’n says:
November 4, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Simple enough. Your basic hydrocarbon of heavier weights, gasoline and the like, comprises one carbon atom attached to two hydrogen ones [CH2] and linked together in a carbon to carbon atom chain, except at the ends.
When one molecule of CH2 burns you get one molecule of H2O and one of CO2 for which the change in molecular weight of 14 for the CH2 is roughly a loss of 2 from the hydrogen[H =1] formation of water and the addition of 32 from the oxygen, 16 each, and since carbon is 12 the change is, again very roughly per CH2 link, from 14 to 44.
Thus by approximate weight on combustion:
C H2 [14] + 3O [48] goes to CO2 [44] + H2O [18]. Apologies for the unconventional notation.
So the weight of the CO2 produced is about three times the weight of the hydrocarbon fuel depending on the chain length. Paraffins vary widely in their composition, so this is far from exact: it is merely to illustrate the general point.
So I hope this clear and helps.
Kindest Regards

There’s something that occurred to my wife, who is far clever than I am; if we just cut down on our use of Obama…………. (I was merely about to point out my shoe size would indicate I must use up a greater amount of carbon as there must be a direct correlation between shoe size 14E, and the force placed upon a gas pedal, but that violates the KISS principle, whereas my wife’s suggestion cuts directly to the heart of the matter.)

There should be a fart stock exchange. I think some of the old guys in Washington DC fart more than others. Their fart footprint is greater than others.

These people leaving gigantic sooty footprints stinking of sanctimonious BS all over the place – isn’t it time they washed their feet?

What is the reason given by environmentalists for prefering to hold conferences in physical locations rather than use teleconferencing, video, and all the other modern communications aids that the non-environmental world uses so successfully to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’ and travel bills?

Ian says:
November 5, 2010 at 2:20 am
“Whilst I’m firmly in the sceptic camp, I calculate that if just 20,000 Americans were sufficiently influenced by the debate to reduce their production of CO2 by 10%, then Copenhagen would have been “paid for”. Surely, this would be a result, whatever your opinion on AGW?”
This fails to include the Americans (and non-Americans) who have been influenced to increase their CO2 production. Those who buy hybrids or solar panels, for instance! Or “energy saving” bulbs that have to be doubled up and left on continuously in order to be bright enough to replace the old incandescents.

One day, probably too late, those who believe in man-made global warming will be proven terribly wrong.
Global cooling will be much worst than global warming.

With an extra 8 million unemployed, we have them saving a gallon of gas by not commuting. This is every day 5 days a week.

davidmhoffer says:
November 4, 2010 at 6:38 pm
“Now I ask, if they truly believed their own rhetoric, why aren’t they, with all their wealth, buying up high altitude properties in northern climes?”
Viking farms in Greenland had one head of cattle for every two heads of other livestock. Currently (last figure I could find) there are less than 20 head of cattle in the entire country. If these people actually believed in the nonsense they were peddling they’d be buying up land in Greenland in anticipation of needing it to graze cattle or at least for some agricultural purpose that isn’t feasible today because growing season is too short. Growing season has lengthened by two weeks in the past 30 years. It needs to lengthen by two more weeks before there’s any serious opportunity for new crops to be introduced like apples.
A tip for all you Greenlanders – keep the cattle herds and the apple orchards separated lest you end up with a bunch of sick cattle down with bellyaches and no apples for yourselves.

Paul Birch says:
November 5, 2010 at 7:03 am
Bruce Cobb says:
November 5, 2010 at 6:04 am

“Carbon Footprint is so yesterday. Now there’s even more reason to feel afraid and ashamed of not living in a 3rd world country and in poverty, called your “ecological footprint”.
http://myfootprint.org/en/
Just for fun, I took the test, and my “score” was 3.63 Earths. Excuse me while I give away all of my posessions and go find a cave to live in.”

I only managed 2.63 Earths. Not a problem, though; my work on terraforming Mars and Venus should cover that quite neatly! The silliest bit – it’s all silly – may be my high marine fisheries footprint, which is odd because I don’t eat fish (I’m allergic). Perhaps the figure would have been smaller if I could have brought myself to tick the “wash cars rarely” and “avoid hosing paths” boxes. I didn’t, because my reason is not “saving water”, but saving effort. Let the rain do it.

Ha! 0.91 earths for me. It was 1.2 earths until last month when I bought a compact car to drive for when I don’t need a full size 4WD diesel pickup truck.
You don’t have to live in a cave to achieve this but it certainly helps and nowhere does this carbon footprint calculator ask if you live in a cave or exactly how much energy you use for heating and cooling. I live in a man-made cave of sorts with three walls and floor sunk deep into a north facing hillside. All my water comes from rainfall I collect and total usage is around 800 gallons per month and half of that I discovered is taken up by the clothes washer but I drain my clothes washer onto the ground so it ends up back where it came from anyhow after a short delay and detour.
I don’t really do this for altruistic reasons. For me it’s a lifestyle engineering challenge to live comfortably, happily, and well under a nominal but not excessively minimalist philosophy and I love a good challenge.

I always wondered what the carbon foot print of the Olympic Games was. There were a lot of celebrity fly-ins for that too.

Bruce Cobb says:
November 5, 2010 at 6:04 am
Ha, my guilt should be bigger than yours. I rated at 8.13 Earths. I’m proud of that. I always knew I was bigger than life and now I have proof! OK, OK, jokes aside, that little eco-footprint calculator was perhaps the biggest waste of time I have ever encountered. What a biased and worthless exercise in stupidity! It’s probably more accurate than the average climate computer model, though…

If all those other people had said that they were not going to go, based on their belief that they should not add to the carbon footprint, etc., then Obama would not have been able to go either. So clearly it is not the president’s fault, but the fault of other people who just can’t get their priorities straight on saving the planet from carbon.
Sorry, I was distracted, there were an infinite number of monkeys at my door claiming to have created a better GCM.

Add to the list …
Breathing for a year (we all like breathing right?) … 429 – 723*
*depends on figures used.

Jimbo says:
November 5, 2010 at 8:42 am
“…..not a single one has evidenced their belief in the “climate emergency” by their own behavior. This has been particularly true for President Obama, Al Gore and Hollywood.”
Not only does Al Gore have the carbon footprint of Godzilla and King Kong combined, he recently purchased an $8 million+ villa on the beach front!!! Al Gore cannot possibly believe in man-made, runaway warming.
The new digs in Montecito is in addition to the place on the waterfront in San Francisco he bought a couple years ago.
For calculating carbon footprints I prefer the rather simple demonstration that shows for the average American your contribution to global CO2 can be graphed as a mark which is 1/ 300 millionth of a quarter of an inch on a graph that is 10 Kilometers long. Of course for the vast majority of Americans even that is a vast exaggeration because it is a national average which is shifted upward dramatically by all the politicians and celebutards flitting about to various garden spots across the planet in their Gulfstreams and BBJs to well provisioned gatherings where they plot new ways to hector the rest of us about how many sheets of TP we use to wipe our bums.

Mowing the lawn (1hr, gas engine push mower) 9.7
Annual lawn care (mow grass 25 times) 242.5
Wow, I can’t believe how green I am.
I only mow my yard 14 times and I don’t use a push mower, I use a 22.5hp, 42″ cut, overhead cam, dual aspirated, cantilever cranked, planed head, .005 overbored, Tim the toolman, Sears and Roebuck wild rider mower.
Hum, maybe not so green.
But I do compost, sort of. Well actually, the mower does it. I never-ever edge, but if I do, it’s electric. Same with the hedge and shrub trimmer and the weed eater. I even chip my own shrub and tree cuttings with a 5hp chipper. I only fertilize three times with a pull behind the mower spreader, but I put on lots of minerals mixed together.
Doesn’t being green mean the envy the neighbors feel looking at my lawn?

Hilarity (and there’s a lot of it about) apart, I think of the people I know who are still alive in Zambia. The elderly gentleman (at 50 or thereabouts, he’s elderly in Zambia) who drives the boat from which my 89 year old Mother still fishes in the Kafue river is one. To him a “carbon footprint” means a mark on the ground made by something which had walked through the ashes of a bushfire.
His house is made from grass and mud. He and his family (most of his children have now left home and gone into “town”) rely on the river to produce a lot of their protein. That this gentleman is employed means that he and his family receive food like nshima (maize flour), meat, cooking oil, salt and other provisions as well as his wage. His light comes from a candle, his wife cooks over burning wood. She’s done that for many years.
Not twenty miles away from where he lives the pylons carrying ample electrical power from the Kariba hydro-electrical generating station to the copper mines march across the landscape. None of this huge amount of energy is available to him or his family.
They need energy to lift their lives from practically the stone age into the 21st Century. This the Greens would deny them on the grounds of CO2 generation whilst they, the Greens, display such arrogant profligacy in their own production.
I know far too many Zambian people to be able to have any sympathy for the “Green Cause”. I know, only too well, what lack of access to cheap energy means and what such a lack does to the lives of real, living people.

The purpose of the trip to India is so we can buy more of their end product shoddy merchandise and services so that we can send parts to them to build the shoddy merchandise and services.
Anybody bought a good graphite-sturdy pencil lately?

Anyone else think the world might be a little cooler without the UN? Well, at least the General Assembly?