Serious about Energy Efficiency, part three. Elon Musk's carbon footprint

Try putting “Elon Musk carbon footprint” into a search engine. You will find plenty. This is, you realize, the world’s richest man, who just managed to talk his company into giving Him a trillion-dollar pay package. This is all money that Tesla is not going to spend on making their products innovative and safe (hint to investors).

You will get an answer right away. According to PC Magazine, “Elon Musk's two private jets alone—not including his emissions from other sources—generate 5,497 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or an average of 15 tonnes per day. This is equal to 11 average people's emissions in their entire lifetimes.” A tonne is a metric ton, that is, a thousand kilograms. Then you can click on a Guardian article that explains, worldwide, “Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1 million homes.” And that article is even out of date; it has gotten worse.

As if you did not already have enough reasons to hate Elon Musk. Imagine him trying to tell a government how to be more efficient.

But we will get nowhere complaining about how the richest people not only waste money while millions of people suffer, or complaining about how the rich do not deserve to be millions of times richer than the average person. Maybe a little, but not a million times. There is a serious point here.

The fault for global warming, caused by carbon emissions, is primarily due to rich nations (like America) and rich people in those rich nations. China emits more carbon than America, but it has over a billion people. The average Chinese person does not emit, directly or indirectly, as much carbon as an average American. I drove a small car when I was living in America, and my “guilt” was much less than an average American, certainly a rich American.

It is clear that one major contributor to global warming is that so many Americans are so rich and wasteful. You knew that. I just want to give you a couple of numbers to consider.

In France, where I now live, the richest ten percent are responsible for 31.2 percent of carbon emissions. But in America, the richest ten percent are responsible for 84.5 percent of carbon emissions. What this means is that rich Americans are really, really rich and wasteful. America needs to become more like France, in which the rich people (at least, the ones who live around Strasbourg) have only moderately showy wealth and are only moderately wasteful.

As long as rich Americans continue to be joyously wasteful, then there will be no solution to the problem of global warming.

A Carbon Ghost Follows Me Around

I keep trying to think of ways of conveying to my students the magnitude of our human impact on the Earth in some form that they can understand. I have my botany students calculate their annual carbon footprints, and the amount of carbon dioxide a tree might absorb during a year (based on their actual estimates of the leaf area of a tree). They are briefly astonished at the number of trees that it would take to offset their carbon production. I think this works, but I get the feeling that they just go through the calculations (which even science majors do incorrectly) and then forget all about it.

Let me try something new. I don’t know if it will help, but I can give it a try.

First, I calculated my carbon footprint, using The Nature Conservancy calculator. Their estimate of my carbon production (31 tons a year) exceeds that of the average American (27 tons) I suspect mainly because I do a lot of driving, even though it is with a small car. The world average is 5.5 tons. This is in CO₂ equivalents; that is, the CO₂ used to manufacture items, grow and process food, and run power plants.

Second, I calculated the amount of carbon dioxide I breathe out. According to one online estimate, a person breathes out 350 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. This would be about 0.3 metric tons, which is pretty close to English tons.

That is, I produce a hundred times as much CO₂ by my activities as I do by breathing. I can therefore try to imagine that, wherever I go, a ghost a hundred times my size is following me around emitting carbon. That is, a hundred times my volume; it would be about 4.6 times as tall, as wide, and as thick. My pet carbon-ghost, chained to me day and night. Maybe a creepy image, buy possibly one that I can use for myself and for my students. I can have them calculate their carbon footprints in tons per year, divide by 0.3, and this is their carbon-ghoul.

I tried this as an extra credit assignment for my students. Many of them did it, since it was quick and easy. I do not know how many of them really thought about the image that they produce a hundred times as much carbon emissions by what they do as by breathing out.

Everything All the Time

A few years ago, or was it a few decades ago, Garrison Keillor included the following idea in one of his monologues. The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a season for everything—a time to be born, a time to die, a time to love, a time to hate, etc. Then he pointed out how differently we view things today. There used to be a season for everything: a time for squash, a time for tomatoes, a time for okra, a time for sweet corn. When they were ripe, we ate them, and the rest of the year we looked forward to eating them. You could always can the vegetables and fruit, but eating canned goods only made you look forward even more to the time when fresh produce was available.

But now everything is available all the time. You can have any kind of produce any time of year (except, usually, fresh okra) at the supermarket. It is always spring or summer somewhere, and in these places, western corporations hire poor natives to work in vast pesticide-drenched fields to raise food for us so we can have fresh tomatoes and sweet corn in January. (Well, if you can call those vaguely reddish blobs in the store “tomatoes.”)

This can be very good, of course, but it can have a massive impact on the Earth and on poor people. Large landowners in Mexico and Central America can make more money raising sugarcane for us than food for poor people in their countries. (There is also an epidemic of kidney disease spreading among sugarcane workers that may be associated with their working conditions.) If you wish to read more about how poor laborers are dying to provide us with food, I recommend Angus Wright’s book The Death of Ramón González.

It’s nice to have fresh produce in January. Eating leaf lettuce all year has helped me maintain a healthy weight and enjoy doing so. But it comes with two price tags: first, the economic oppression of the world’s poor; second, the loss of seasonal expectations. Many people keep their homes the same temperature and wear shorts all year, perhaps only vaguely aware that the seasons are changing outside. Instead of winter, budburst, flowering, squash, corn, barbecue, pumpkins, pecans, autumn foliage, and Christmas, some people’s annual cycle seems to consist of Non-Christmas, barbecue, and Christmas. I enjoy bundling up in a chilly house in winter and sitting under a ceiling fan in summer, with just enough heating and cooling to keep my house between about 62 and 85. And I enjoy watching the seasons. I enjoy spring budburst and light green leaves during their brief season. In my world, of which I am sensually aware and in which I rejoice, there is a season for everything. And it is also a world with a lower carbon footprint than I would have if I insisted on everything all the time.

A Poem As Useful As a Tree

I wish everyone could enjoy the beauty of trees as much as I do. Each one is a better poem than anything written by a human. Even ugly trees (and there are a few) are interesting. But if someone just thinks trees are useful, I’ll settle for that.

I had my botany students do an exercise in trigonometry, in which they measured a tree (each group had its own tree) and estimate the number of twigs on the tree. The results were astonishing. It is not unusual for a big oak tree to have 50,000 twigs.

Then I had them estimate their own carbon footprints, using websites that do the calculations. A typical number would be 50,000 kg of carbon dioxide per year from their activities.

Next I had them do some simple arithmetic. Just some multiplying and dividing. I had them assume (from actual measurements made in previous years) that each twig had 100 square cm of leaf area. This would mean a typical tree had 5,000,000 square cm of leaf area, which is 500 square m (they had trouble with this). If you assume (also based on measurements in previous years) that a typical tree absorbed 10 grams per square meter per day of carbon dioxide, this would be 5,000 grams or 5 kg of carbon dioxide per day. This may seem low to you, but remember these are post oaks in a dry forest. This means that it would take their tree 10,000 days to absorb 50,000 kg of carbon dioxide. Assume a growing season is 180 days. It would take the tree over 55 years to absorb that much carbon dioxide.

Which means there has to be 55 mature oak trees to compensate for one person’s carbon emissions.