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."

Comments

What's the point here?

[AnhZone]

Why do we care about prehistoric plants that turned into underground petrochemical deposits millions for years ago. I agree that cars are ridiculously inefficient, but underground oil is not one of the natural features I am worried about being disturbed. Above-ground pollution, oil spills, global warming, yes, but why cry for rotten prehistoric plants?

John

Re:reasonably efficient?

[weave]

A U.S. gallon is 4/5ths that of an Imperial gallon, so once you adjust for that, you're down in the crap range as well!

Re:burgers

[misterpies]

Major logical fallacy: that 2 tons (or however much) went to make the whole cow, not a single burger. Your single quarter-pounder is no doubt equivalent to several pounds of cowfeed, but that's nothing like as ineffecient as the conversions being talked about here.

Moreover however much the cow ate, its food came from recently grown, mostly sustainable sources (eg hay). It's carbon neutral over a matter of years. Burning up fossil fuels at this rate would be carbon neutral only over thousands if not millions of years, i.e. it would take that may years of plant growth to put that carbon back in the soil.