Cars use gas to power themselves, just as people use food. And energy is energy, no matter where you get it. So, how many calories are in a gallon of gas? How does that compare to our food?
View Burning Fuel: The Average Car Vs. The Average Human
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DISCUSSION: 12 Comments
In the present debate on the impact of cars on the environment, economy and foreign policy (including our two current wars in the middle east), what is absent in a holistic view of the auto industry. Electric engines are great, but just the tip of the ice berg. Cars can and should be build out of plastic and carbon-fiber in microfactories rather than the $1 billion steel plants spitting out Detroit’s gas guzzlers. The Rocky Mountain Institute long ago proved from combing through road fatality data that lighter cars are safer than heavy ones in all crashes than head-on-head collisions (that account for a small fraction of deaths). Its the size of a car, literally the amount of time your brain has to decelerate, that counts.So the good news is that if we build light, fuel efficient plastic cars they will be safe and won’t require massive factories. Plastic can be melted easily without the huge capital intensive machines required of steel. Plastic also can be recycled much more easily. With microfactories it will be possible to build cars just-in-time like a dell computer, rather than in huge batches. The current structural inventory of cars built but not sold (even before the crisis) would fill a parking lot the size of Rhode Island.Finally, making sure that you bring your car back to the same place it was built at the end of its life, like an HP ink cartridge, rather than adding to the world’s pollution is essential. I’m all for battery powered cars, but last time I checked batteries usually end up in a dump and are amongst the most toxic kind of waste. Has anyone figured that out yet?
Lead-acid batteries are ~95% recyclable, and most of that is recycled as long as you turn the battery in when you buy a new one. Last year, you could get $20 / battery if you brought it to the recycler.I also like plastics, fiberglass, and carbon-fiber (for bodies), but it is very expensive to manufacture with those materials (as well as not environmentally friendly… the resins are quite toxic and irritating). The largest problem I have with the auto indsutry using plastics and carbon fiber is that they don’t react well to cost-cutting measures; instead of “yeilding” or “bending”, they tend to shatter (my oil dipstick tube is plastic; the engine oil removed the elastomers from the plastic, and it shattered — fixed with some heat shrink tubing, but…)Last year, I would have picked cars to be pretty recyclable: first they go to a scrpyard, where poeple pick over the carcasses to get replacement parts, and then they would be sent to a metal recycling facility to be melted down and sent back to the factory. With China refusing barges of scrap metal because it is too cheap to make a profit, I’m not sure nowadays…-Thor Johnsonhttp://www.scientificconservation.com
If a gallon of gas = 31,268 calories and the average daily intake = 2000 calories then 2000 =/= 16% of 31,268. It’s more like 6.4% of 31,268. Someone should really double check the math of an image before it’s allowed to be posted.
Of course, this graph doesn’t take into account the unfathomable number of calories it took to PRODUCE said car, now, does it. Face it folks: our automobile addiction is simply not sustainable.
This comparison is meaningless. Of course cars output more waste and burn more energy because they are outputting much more work than the average human. A more interesting comparison would be the efficiency of the average car to the efficiency of the average human.
Hahaha – what about humanity _is_ sustainable?
You made a small mistake in your calculations…Human food is measured in “Calories”… which in reality is KILO-Calories. Humans consume 2,000,000 calories worth of energy per day or 2,000 kilo-calories. So your numbers when food calories were used are off by a factor of 1000
Absolutely stupid comparison. You didn’t average in the equal energy a human would have to work, to exert the same power, as a automobile. Perhaps I’ll just jump on your back and demand you to carry me to work every day, and my family on the weekends, and examine the “efficient” human burns less energy than my car.
epic fail
How in the heck do you get 29.6 lbs. of CO2 out of 6 quarts of unleaded???
So let’s stop driving cars and start walking to save calories. How long will it take us to get from home to work? How many of us will keep our jobs? How will this impact the economy and our ability to feed ourselves? But alas, we will reduce calorie consumption or will we, since a calorie is the amount of energy to do a defined amount of work?
agreed – I don’t understand how you get 26 lbs of waste CO2 out of 1.4 gallons of gasoline.can this infographic be revised?