I did some very rough calculations, once, about the actual mass of the fuel I burn when I exercise. It occurred to me today that the output of my exercise is greenhouse gasses.
Yep, each month I’m putting 2kg of CO2 into the atmosphere in my selfish desire to be healthy. And that’s nothing compared to my sweetie. She’s practically a terrorist with all the carbon she’s exhaling.
The only way to be neutral is to do nothing, to be nothing.
That, or carbon balance by exercising with tree-planting.
have no fear, the emissions literature uses the unit GtC – as in gigatonnes – to describe our fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
I got an amusing error message on the suicide squirrel alert. Also, just ordered something from amazon. Just wanna be sure you get your kickback. With holidays I will probably be ordering more, so it better work. I want you to win that pink cadillac (or is that a different company?).
Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope recently tackled the opposite question in a column titled: How much energy is wasted hauling around U.S. body fat? He discusses extra energy costs and greenhouse emissions all the obese people are causing. Just two more reasons to despise the fat and indolent who imperil our planet: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3048/followup
An interesting article and it even cites its sources. While signal-to-noise is problematic with studies like those, and they aren’t replicated as a rule, I think “bigger people buy bigger cars” is pretty easily provable.
When a Lincoln navigator blows past me on the highway, I often say to myself, “more proof that gasoline doesn’t cost enough.”
I never think that, when a big car is blowing past me on the freeway. The driver is comfortable, insulated from the outside world, and going fast — what’s not to love?
But every time I see a car sitting in a strip-mall parking lot (pretty much the only form of commercial development in Scotts Valley) with the engine running — whether to keep the AC running or to make sure the plugged-in cell phone doesn’t deplete the enormous battery — I think that gasoline (or diesel) doesn’t cost enough.
And the U.S. is set to become the world’s largest oil exporter sometime between 2017 and 2020. So much for drilling our way to energy independence… our resources will be sold on the open market, to the highest bidder.