RE: CAR BRANDS
March 26, 2015 at 12:25 pm
(This post was last modified: March 26, 2015 at 12:38 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(March 26, 2015 at 10:59 am)popeyespappy Wrote: Well I don't plan on trading in my pickup for a horse anytime soon, but the answer to the original question appears to be better. According to this article the average car produces 8,320 pounds of CO2 a year. This one says methane is more than 20x more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. 18 x 2.2 x 20 = 792 so your average car causes 10x more greenhouse effect than your average horse.
An average car might transport an average of 2 persons an average of 10,000 miles in the average year, and cost those 2 persons an average of 300 hours spent in relative safety during the transit. How many horses does it take to pull a carriage with 2 persons 10,000 miles in one year, and taking only 300 hours to do it?
I somehow doubt that for truly equivalent amount of desired work done, an endothermic horse, whose metabolism is devoted 90% to keeping a constant body temperature, would be as efficient as an automobile, both in terms amount of total energy input required, and green house gas generated in the processing of that energy.
If you can harness your carriage to cold blooded lizards, maybe.
(March 26, 2015 at 11:28 am)Stimbo Wrote: You're right that nuclear is certainly cleaner than fossil in that there's no greenhouse gases, but of course there's all that inconvenient radioactive waste to get rid of. And we'll inevitably run out of Russian agents to eat it all.
Breed more russian agents.
At the rate of 20 milligrams per agent before they croak, it would take only 2 billion russian agents a year to eat the nuclear waste output of 1 mid sized nuclear reactors.
So we need an steady yearly output of about 1 trillion fresh russian agents to digest all the radioactive wastes from the world's nuclear power industry.
