Small acts, big consequences
This morning Facebook coughed up a random quote that got me thinking. It was from Howard Zinn:
“We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
The implied message is, of course, that the change will be for the better. However, we all know that the changes in the world today are overwhelmingly NOT for the better. My contrarian mind immediately recognized that the "small acts" Zinn refers may have good and/or bad effects. When the effects of billions of small acts all over the world are put together, the outcome is grand, heroic-style change.
That got me thinking. what is the effect of one small climate-changing act? Say for the sake of example, driving to the store for milk and bread? What is the ultimate effect of that one small act, and the millions more like it? I decided to figure it out.
My small act of a car trip, say of one kilometer each way to the store and back, consumes about 150 grams (about 5 ounces) of gasoline. The energy released by burning that gasoline is equivalent to exploding 3 pounds of TNT (burning gasoline releases ten times more energy than exploding the same weight of TNT, though somewhat more slowly).
The fun doesn't stop there, though. The real problem with burning a fossil fuel like gasoline is not just the energy we release in burning it. The real problem is the amount of energy that gets added to the Earth system by radiative forcing due to the CO2 that is produced.
There have been several calculations of this effect, one of which is given at the link below. They all show that the energy trapped by the added greenhouse effect is about 10,000 times greater than the energy of the original combustion.
This means that in one single car trip to buy milk, the 5 ounces of gasoline you burn have the same eventual effect on the planet as exploding 15 tonnes of TNT.
Driving a single car for one year has the eventual effect of exploding TEN Hiroshima-size atomic bombs: 150 kilotons.
If you drive your personal car an average distance of 12,000 to 15,000 miles in a year you will have an energy impact on the planet equivalent to setting off a medium sized thermonuclear weapon. In other words: If you drive, then every year you are setting off a hydrogen bomb.
In fact, one year of the world's gasoline use has the same energy effect on the planet as exploding 35,000 megatonnes of hydrogen bombs. That's 15 times the total yield of the world's operational nuclear weapons. Fifteen times the world's total nuclear arsenal. Each and every year.
It's something to think about on your next "little" trip to the store.
http://onymousguy.blogspot.ca/2015/12/diamonds-and-co2-are-forever-ii-wonkish.html
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