Who Really Worries About Carbon Emissions?
Carbon Footprints – Source: SPPI
The data below is from various carbon footprint calculators scattered about the web and largely based on EPA emissions estimates and conversations. Of all the agitators and propagandists lecturing the common person about their large carbon footprint life styles, 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.
Activity CO2 footprint (lbsCO2)
Burn a gallon of gasoline 19.4
Use a kWh of electricity (U.S. average fuel mix) 1.3
Car trip to the grocery store (roundtrip 15 miles) 11.6
Mowing the lawn (1hr, gas engine push mower) 9.7
Watch TV (42” LCD), 4 hrs 1.1
Make a pot of coffee 0.3
Use a desktop computer (CRT screen) 8 hrs 2.1
Use a 75W light bulb for 4hrs 0.4
Fly 1,000 miles 440
Annual refrigerator usage 827
Annual lawn care (mow grass 25 times) 242.5
Annual desktop computer usage (1,000 hrs) 260
Annual TV usage (42” LCD, 1000hrs) 406
Annual Coffee (365 pots per year) 109.5
Annual usage of 75W light bulb (1,500 hrs) 146.3
Annual car usage (12,000 miles @ 25mpg) 9,391
Annual home heating/cooling 30,000
Average American per year 45,000
Obama Entourage to India (flights only) 18,671,400
Obama Entourage to India (estimated, all sources) 27,921,100
U.N. Climate Confab (Copenhagen) 89,100,000
I think I broke the quiz:
Quote
“Congratulations, you are living an ecologically conscientious lifestyle.
If everyone lived like you do, we would need only 0.00 Earths.”
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.
Alexander K – sorry to take so long to get back to you. I’m assuming you’re not taking the p##s. Surely, given that fossil fuels are a finite resource and costs are rising, it would make sense to reduce personal consumption. You don’t have to believe the alarmist stuff to see that.
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?
Just for fun, I retook the “test”, answering all the ambiguous questions the other way. This time my footprint came out as only 1.6 Earths (down from 2.6). But my non-fish-eating impact on fisheries was even higher!
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.
[snip -off topic video ~mod]
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?
http://flightaware.com/analysis/allflights_movie.rvt
Until this movie of 24 hours of commercial flight traffic over the USA is stopped, any serious carbon reductions are meaningless and may cause civil strife as the average American starts asking pointed questions about why he is supposed to give up his way of life, while the moneyed elite continue to fly over his tent.
I’m not the only American who noted how wonderfully blue the skies over America became in the 5 days of no flying allowed after 9/11/2001. Ground the planes and let business use video conferencing, then we can talk about what the average person must sacrifice for his government overlords.
Anyone else think the world might be a little cooler without the UN? Well, at least the General Assembly?
7.63 Earths
Miles on airplanes for business, etc. are about half of it. The other half seems to be what I eat…despite the fact that I do garden and compost..not sure how half of my carbon footprint is from sea-food when I eat it about 3 times a year, but maybe sea-food is very bad for the environment. Think its time to eat more of it…
On the other hand, where I live, beef is so cheap that there is no reason to not eat it. All grown and raised locally where it comes into the supermarket directly from the farms about 10 miles out. Transportation costs are almost nil, so we eat $2 lb ground beef, on up for steaks which are just as cheap.