Sherry Chandler

Running more numbers

In response to some recent posts here on the blog, our intrepid poet/publisher Charlie Hughes has run some numbers of his own:

This morning I’m reading about Google who has announced that it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop renewable energy as part of a plan to help clean the environment and reduce the company’s own electric bill. “Solar isn’t currently cheaper than coal,” Google co-founder Larry Page said. “That’s the point of this — to get it there.” Google named the project RE<C, short for Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal, and hopes to benefit from cheaper electricity by reducing the costs of running its vast electricity-hungry data centers.

I realize that just moments ago I turned up my thermostat a couple of degrees, and now I’m wondering how this translates into harm to the environment. What if everyone in the country turned up their thermostats two degrees. How much coal would that consume? How much environmental harm would that do? I’m sure somebody somewhere has done that calculation in regard to CO₂ emissions, or global warming, or mercury emissions, etc. Not having the necessary facts, I can’t do the calculations. I’m not willing to say though, that my two measly degrees will produce no effect.

Many people, including many of Kentucky’s legislators, are evidently of the opinion that puny little man is incapable of altering the environment of the Earth, as gigantic as it is. I think the reason is that we humans are incapable of grasping the enormity of the situation. We can’t, for example, grasp the enormity of the national debt. Likewise, are incapable of doing the proper mental gymnastics to understand our effect on the environment. To that end, and since we Kentuckians know pickup trucks, here are a couple of calculations I’ve done, based on readily verifiable facts, which will be enlightening:

1. Each day year-round in Kentucky more than 1000 tons of explosives are used in coal mining. If this quantity of explosives were loaded into pickup trucks it would produce a convoy more than 10 miles long every day of the year.

2. In 2005 Kentucky coal production was 125 million tons. This rate of coal production would fill about 685,000 pickup trucks each day, and would produce a pickup truck convoy about 3,000 miles in length every day of the year. (If proper spacing for moving vehicles is allowed, the covoy would reach from New York City to SanFrancisco, every day.)

And these calculations apply only to Kentucky. West Virginia and Wyoming each produce more coal than Kentucky, not to mention other coal-producing states. Who among us is willing to say that burning this much coal has no effect on the environment? Not me.

With a P.S.:

If a baby is born every 8 seconds in the US, that’s 10,800 babies each day. This corresponds to a convoy of baby buggies with mothers more than 10 miles long each day.

And a P.P.S.:

29,569, the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004

Lay these bodies end-to-end. 32 miles. Lexington to Frankfort.

1. Running the numbers
2. “Kentucky’s Undeground Economy”
3. Noodling in Polluted Streams
4. Watching the river flow
5. More on Gooch

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