RSSThe High Cost of Bringing People Together
Sep 15
Yesterday, I attended the Austin City Limits music festival in downtown Austin, Texas to enjoy live music in an open air venue with thousands of my closest friends. Which is to say I took the highway from the suburbs to downtown, which was bumper to bumper most of the way. Once downtown I circled for ages, looking for parking before walking to the shuttles which dropped me off within walking distance of the venue. And of course the process was made more difficult by the thousands of other people driving around throughout the city. All of this travel gave me time to reflect on some statistics about another outdoor music festival, Burning Man, published in a recent Scientific American:
Burning Man Attendees: 40,000
Carbon emissions from burning “the man”: 112 tons
Total on-site emissions: 2.473 tons
Emissions from participant’s travel: 25,019 tons
This made me realize how environmentally dangerous our cars really are. Even if the event had been held to raise money for environmental causes, the very act of bringing so many people together causes so much more residual polution that it would defeat the purpose! What could be more ironic than raising money for the environment by driving hundreds of cars in circles for days?
Organizers could dream up ways, like the natural gas shuttles provided at ACL, to lower the event’s environmental impact. What about walking to the event? It’s good exercise and there’s no internal combustion involved, right? Well, when you add up the carbon footprint of the delivery trucks that brought the food in your stomach to your local grocery store or restaurant, it turns out that on short trips your total footprint is lower if just drive there. SciAm notes that even Burning Man made a token effort, by generating their own power with a 30-kilowatt solar array.
Weeklong carbon offset by the 30-kilowatt solar array: 6.9 tons
Sep 17, 2007 @ 10:37:42
How was ACL this year? What were the highlights?
Good notes on the stats of the travel. I read about that “walking can take more energy than driving” bit before but I really don’t believe it. Your increased food consumption to compensate for walking just isn’t high enough. Let’s say I average 2,000 calories a day. If I walk 2km round-trip to the store my increased caloric intake is probably only going to be 2,100 – if that (for a 2k walk I probably wouldn’t even feel the need to eat more). I can’t believe the amortized CO2 of that one little 100 calorie item would be more than driving. Maybe they’re both so small that they’re about equal.
Sep 18, 2007 @ 08:11:42
Well, I went for Queens of the Stone Age. Then after the White Stripes canceled, Bob Dylan was really the only big name left. But the weather was great and the music was nonstop, so it was a good show.
http://www.lowfatlifestyle.com/calories.htm
The calculation is based partly on time as well. Say the store is a 5 minute drive or a 30 minute walk away. According to this site, a brisk walk consumes 52 calories per 10 min, or 156 calories in 30 minutes. Or for a guy my weight, 216 calories.
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030802/food.asp
Let’s say I get that energy by eating two apples. Those apples where shipped to my local grocery store by trucks from out of state farms. They’re likely to travel an average of 1500 miles, let’s assume both in the same shipment, not counting from my shopping cart to my car to my front door (because it’s amortized across all food purchased at one time, not each individual fruit).
So the choice is, do I drive 5 minutes or walk for 30 on the energy of food that traveled 1500 miles to get to me? Presuming further that trucks are less fuel efficient that cars, it’s clear that more emissions are generated that way. In fact, consider the amount of energy required to walk 300 miles. My reasonably fuel efficient car can do that with one tank of gas. But how much food must I consume to make a journey like that on foot?
This analysis is not meant to condone excessive driving, or bad driving habits like idling too much. It is meant as an indictment of the distribution system that add so much hidden cost to everything we do. People just need to be aware that those costs are there. As the article above says, you have the choice to buy locally grown produce, which drastically changes the calculations in Earth’s favour.