It really wasn’t that long ago when the Western U.S. wasn’t absolutely guaranteed to be on fire every summer and into the fall. Now, it’s just what happens. August and September? That’s “smoke season”. What should be absolutely beautiful months to enjoy the outdoors are now when it rains ash, the sky is a deep apocalyptic orange in the middle of the day, and small talk is about AQI. People plan trips to be elsewhere because you can count on it like rain in the spring and snow in the winter.
When I think about human contribution to climate change, I always think about cars and how relatively recent there are in Earth’s history. We’ve only been producing cars for ~120 years and we’ve made over 2 billion of them. Two billion fossil fuel burning cars. Each car burns ~5,000 gallons of gas in it’s life.
2,000,000,000 * 5,000 = 10,000,000,000,000
Ten trillion. In the last 120 years we’ve set ten trillion gallons of gasoline on fire. Just seems like yeahhh that’s probably not going to go good.
I’m part of that, to be sure. Sorry about that, kids.
Hi Chris!
Where does that 5000 Gallons per car come from?
A short calculation:
I’m from Germany and here a car goes about 200,000 kilometers in it’s lifetime (some do more, some do less) and it burns about 7 liters per 100 km. That results in about 1,400,000 liters. That are 370.370 gallons. Quite a difference.