The currently fashionable environmental disaster du jour is, of course, global warming. Global warming is the concept that certain gases, among methane and carbon dioxide, accumulate in the upper atmosphere and prevent the re-radiation of heat from the surface of the planet back into space.
We refer to these collectively as greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide is thought to be one of the most important of these. Carbon dioxide is totally harmless to humans and wildlife and, in fact, enormously beneficial to plants. But it has accumulated in the atmosphere over the last 50 years with the industrialization of the world at a fairly dramatic rate.
So the concept is that this will lead to increased global temperatures and environmental dislocation. While in the millennic sense of the planet temperatures go up and temperatures go down, for us humans even small climatic changes can be fairly disastrous. So while it's easy to dismiss this global warming theory as the effect it has on the planet, it could have a profound effect on us.
The Little Ice Age in Europe of a couple hundred years ago or even the dislocations caused by the El Nino change in Pacific current patterns and that effect on weather can certainly be inconvenient. The planet will be just fine but life in St. Louis may not be what we would perhaps want it to be. Burning gasoline, a gallon of gasoline, produces a little over 19 and a half pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon.
Now this is kind of interesting since a gallon of gasoline only weighs a little over six pounds. Remember we said that we also consume a great deal of clean air in combusting gasoline. The carbon dioxide is a function of the combination of a little over two kilograms of carbon in the gasoline with an immense amount of oxygen.
That's how you get 19 and a half pounds of CO2 from a gallon of gasoline. There have been some heroic efforts directly funded by the oil industry in recent years and months to tie the electric car to likewise producing just as much CO2 as the gasoline engine. This is simply nonsense.
Obviously the electric vehicle doesn't produce any directly so they've gone after the electricity. Let's talk some numbers. I love numbers.
While the gasoline combustion produces 19 and a half pounds of CO2 per gallon and we can go about 21.3 miles on a gallon of gasoline. To produce a kilowatt hour of electricity using our absolutely dirtiest form of electricity production which is coal we get a figure of about 2.1 pounds of CO2 for every kilowatt burn. Now it's going to take us about five kilowatt hours to go that same 21.3 miles of forward travel gives us about ten and a half pounds of carbon dioxide.
A little over half of the CO2 produced for the same distance travel. That's not really the end of the story. When you're sitting at the stoplight with a gasoline engine car your engine still idling and still producing the CO2.
When you pull up in an electric car you're not consuming anything because you don't have the switch closed and so you're not producing CO2. Obviously electricity produced by hydroelectric or nuclear or solar or wind does not have this same environmental impact and indeed nationally our average electricity production from all sources when you put them all together in one lump basket we produce about 1.35 pounds of CO2 for a kilowatt of electricity and that would get get you to about six and a half pounds of CO2 for 21.3 miles of forward motion compared to the 19 and a half pounds with a gallon of gasoline. Note too that the oil company propaganda left out entirely the CO2 produced to transport the crude oil, refine it to gasoline and transport the gasoline to the gasoline station.
Nineteen and a half pounds is the nth part of it. So the numbers simply do not bear out the tale that if you measure end to end you wind up with the same problem just move to a different place. Conceptually a moron you could see that it's much easier to operate more efficiently with large plant than with 244 million small ones but for those that can't conceive of this mentally those are the actual numbers.
The true CO2 print of an electric car is something less than six and a half pounds. Again we're not burning because we don't idle at the stoplight or when we're coasting which you do very much so in a gasoline engine. So something less than six and a half pounds compared to nineteen and a half pounds.
It's a heroic gain in CO2 production. Again when we go to the aggregate of what this means nationally we are burning 375 million gallons a day and that works out to about 2.3 a million metric tons of CO2 which is an immense amount of gas from one activity. If we multiply that out by the year it gets to be a number that's essentially nonsense.
I call it a Brazilian but it's just a big number to try to visualize it. I would note that the average weight of a vehicle in the United States today is 4,144 pounds as of the end of 2008 and the amount of CO2 produced by those 244 million vehicles would then be essentially the weight of 650 million such vehicles. So we're producing a little over two times the weight of our car each year in carbon dioxide burning gasoline.
The bottom line is that if your exhaust pipe was mounted in the center of your steering wheel instead of at the rear of your car you'd be much more likely to get on the bandwagon of converting to electric vehicles. So yes you can recycle and you can change your light bulbs. You can even carry your groceries home in burlap sacks.
But if you want to have an impact on the environment there's no act an individual can perform as powerful as driving an electric car. Do we as a nation have the political will to convert to electric power plants for our cars and achieve these efficiencies? Can our existing automotive manufacturers bring together the technology and the economies of scale necessary to produce an attractive plug-in electric vehicle? I can't really answer those questions. What I can tell you is that a 53 year old guy wearing yellow shoes with no particular mechanical skills or prospects for gainful employment working half days in his garage falling down the road more or less can well enough to suit his own transportation needs.