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4 Tons Of Plants per Mile to Ride In Your Car
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you might know, I enjoy big numbers. So it's just natural that I was attracted by this news release from the University of Utah, "Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon." "A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles." For a reasonably efficient car, riding 25 miles per gallon, this translates to 4 tons of prehistoric plants per mile, or more than two tons per kilometer. The research paper also mentions that everyday, we are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plants growing during a whole year just for our cars. Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are. This analysis describes the calculations and contains other details about the research paper which will be published in November by Climate Change."
4 ton SUV? Holy crap... that's 8,818.4 (2204.6 x 4) lbs. worth of vehicle. Damn... that's pretty efficient, if you ask me. I mean, seriously, at 25 miles per gallon, if you take 4 tons of prehistoric plants per mile, that means you're moving 4+ tons of modern SUV and the accompanying family for the price of 4 tons of prehistoric plants. Wow... so 1:1 conversion rate of prehistoric plants to modern SUV goodness. Not too shabby.
Of course, you're incredibly wrong in many things... First, the average US car doesn't weigh 9,000 lbs. In fact, It doesn't even weigh HALF that. The highest selling car in the US is the Toyota Camry, which, as of the 2004 edition, weighs a grand total of 3,142 lbs. give or take 100 lbs, depending on the configuration. I understand you were joking, but I just wanted to clarify. So, take the highest selling car weight and add 350 lbs for a couple people... just round it out to 3,500 lbs. That's 1.75 tons (or 1.59 metric tons).
Second, I'm interested to know what car you drive, and how much it costs. I took a brief glance at BMW's website, and I could only find 3 cars that break the 30 mpg barrier (the 700 series, the X3 SUV, and the X5 SUV). The highest one I found was 43mpg. However, I certainly don't consider my research to be the end-all, be-all conclusive summary of BMW models available.
Third, I would hardly call 25mpg "crap". I'd love to see a study that shows when the world will run out of oil, given the past 25 or so years of usage. This planet is billions of years old... I hardly think our driving SUV's around for a couple decades is going to kill it. However, if anyone has a link to a study that shows exactly when we're destined to run out of oil (please, none sponsored by the UN... no offense, but they're a bunch of tree-hugging hippies that would twist and distort facts to suit their own purposes (and they have) anyway), I'd be glad to take a look. My guestimate would be... around the year 29,296. Give or take 10,000 years.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
By cutting off your feet.
Reduce your energy consumption.
By not consuming any at all - unless you're an eco-whacko Leftist on the way to protest SUVs, in which case it's perfectly acceptable to fly a polluting jet airplane
Reduce your soil consumption.
I'm safe here; I don't eat dirt. However, the eco-whacko Left would prefer that I reduce it anyway by composting myself - as soon as possible
Reduce your area consumption.
By living in straw huts packed with 20 people
Be more efficient.
By vandalizing and destroying other people's goods (so that they must consume more resources in order to repair or replace them) and setting traps for lumberjacks (so that they "reduce their energy consumption").
Arrr!