The Power in Gasoline Have you ever thought about the amount of power in a gallon of gasoline equated to human power? Picture a car that gets 30 miles to the gallon. Your average small Honda or Toyota. Can you push this car 1 mile in a day? If you are over 40 years old, probably not. If you are really fit you may be able to push this car 2 miles in a day. So the for the average 1 mile per day car pusher there are 30 man-days of labor in a single gallon of gasoline. That little jug of gas, the size of a gallon of milk, has the amount of energy that equals you sweating your butt off for a month. It also includes the 40 or 50 pounds of food that you would eat for a month. The Creator gave us an amazing gift in hydrocarbon power. A gift that we are totally wasting on trips to the mall to buy Chinese made plastic gagas. We are using this gift as slave labor to empower our foolish egoistic desires at the expense of Life on Earth. So lets put some dollars in the equation so you can really relate to that little gallon of gasoline. If you paid someone $10 dollars an hour to push your car around and that person could push you and your car and your Chinese gagas a mile a day then it would cost you $80.00 per mile or $2400.00 for every 30 miles. So your little gallon of gasoline is worth around $2400.00 in human labor. Assume you have hired a strong young teen to push you and your 2000 pounds of carbon debt around the city and he can push you 2 miles a day. That would mean each gallon is worth only $1200.00. If you use 10 gallons a week for your average lifestyle the cost in human labor is $12,000.00 per week; 20 gallons equals $24,000 per week. No wonder we will do anything to keep our gasoline fix. The real cost of gasoline slave labor in human terms is astronomical. If you had a few acres of land, a cabin, a chain saw, a roto tiller and 5 gallons of gasoline, you could live a simple lifestyle with very little real labor. The 5 gallons of gasoline could do all the real work required to feed you and cut firewood. But it will not supply you with any of the wasteful luxuries that we are addicted to. It is obvious that moving 2000 lbs of steel and plastic to transport a 200 lb human is very inefficient. The energy that you expend on a trip to McDonalds for a burger is many, many times greater than the energy in the burger itself. You might be able to push your car a few blocks from the energy in a burger. I think it is important to repeat myself regarding this. The more I think about it, the deeper I see into my addiction to gasoline. If I make a 10 mile round trip to buy a meal and I think about the amount of energy it would take me to push the car 10 miles, which is 10 days of hard labor for a 1 mile per day car pusher. Wow! I would have to keep myself alive, fed and fit for 10 days of hard labor just to make a 10 mile trip for dinner. I would have to eat 30 meals to provide the power to drive to one meal. (This all doubles if I am driving a 15mpg SUV and doesnt include the hydrocarbon debt of getting the food to the restaurant.) It is easy to see that the future is in bicycles or rickshaws. Your young teen could probably move you a mile or two an hour in a rickshaw as he would only have to push you and not your 2000 pounds of carbon debt. There is NO SUSTAINABLE FUTURE in any kind of automobile based society. It doesnt matter if your little box on wheels gets 100 miles per gallon. This kind of statement is definitely water off a ducks back. WAKE UP DUCKY!!!!!! There is a very similar amount of hydrocarbon power in home heating fuels, oil or gas. Picture the black aluminum heat sinks that are on the back of many electrical devices. These heat sinks dissipate extra heat from the electrical device into the air. Our cities are just big heat sinks. Our buildings only hold heat for a very short time. Every time your furnace comes on, it means that quantity of heat has escaped to the outdoors. A gallon of fuel oil only lasts a few hours in the average home during the winter. Multiply 5 to 10 gallons of oil per day times the number of homes in a city times 100 days of winter and the numbers get crazy in a hurry. It is ABSOLUTE INSANITY to be constantly burning this amount of power to heat (or cool) buildings. The highest use for oil is to make insulation, not to make heat. 10 gallons of heating oil will move a 1984 Volkswagen diesel Rabbit for 500 miles. Would you rather walk 500 miles, heat your home for 1 or 2 days or run your garden tractor to eat? In the not too distant future we are going to face decisions like this. At this moment Ill bet the little quacker in the back of your brain is telling you that it will never come to this and I dont know what I am talking about. You and your little quacker better get in touch with the real world Ducky. A bunch of people are going to make trillions of dollars selling hope to a doomed civilization. The only hope is to fix the basis of the problem, not to apply band aids. The real basis of the problem is that we live by the doctrine that humanity has Dominion over the Earth. The Earth exists to satisfy any desire the human race can conceive, regardless of the cost to our Earth Mother. Anything we can invent to increase our comfort and decrease our sweat equity in this lifetime is totally justified. WRONG AGAIN DUCKY!!!!! You can only live outside of the Natural Laws of Earth for a finite drop of time. We could have super insulated every building in the U.S.A. for the cost of the Iraq War and told the oil companies to shove it. What are the two biggest drugs in America?? Electricity and Gasoline. We will do absolutely anything to keep our fix: Go to war, Drop nuclear bombs, Cause a climatic change that is of the order of the changes that ended the age of the dinosaurs. The most valid reason I can come up with for knowing that the shit is going to hit the fan and we are headed into very tough times is to look at my own lifestyle. Despite my knowledge of the problems and my ranting and raving about things, I am still living in poorly insulated housing and burning as much gasoline as I want to. Our cultures response to its problems is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Bill Record / Medicine Bear is involved in creating the Earth Town Network, a series of eco villages across the country based on the Peace Principles.
_______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/
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