My Honda Civic and offsetting its 6 and a half story high fart bubble.

So I went to a site today called Cool Drive Pass, which is a carbon offsetting project spearheaded by some colleagues of mine at UBC and their friends in Vancouver. Essentially, it's a calculator designed to figure out carbon dioxide emissions of your car, and then to equate an "offsetting fee," where the funds would essentially go to some renewable energy project.

Anyway, carbon offsetting is a bit of contentious issue, since it's viewed by many a stalwart environmentalist as a step, even a step in the right direction, but more likely a step that condones complacency. In other words, some folks thinks it's a bit like paying off your guilt.

As well, there appears to be some criticism over how such projects are chosen, and whether they ever actually deliver. And oddly enough, Coldplay, the rock band is often mentioned in reference to this challenge, having a mango tree plantation project linked to its CD, A Rush of Blood to the Head. Here, their collaborators (CarbonNeutral Co.) have been under a lot of fire regarding the project's progress as well as issues of transparency related to ascertaining this progress (or lack thereof).

But, I'm of the opinion that for all of the troubles this "offsetting" may have, it is at least something done for the better and usually with good intentions. In particular, an entity like CoolDrivePass is partly all about attempting to choose "good" offsetting projects on the publics behalf. At the very least, anyone who partakes in offsetting, gets a wide eyed look at what different parts of their lives amount to with respect to something like fossil fuel emissions.

Which brings me to my fart bubble.

Turns out, for my Honda Civic, at the average 20,000 kilometres per year of commuting, there is a net release of 4.1 metric tons of CO₂ per year. That's 4,100,000 grams! If you take the Ideal Gas Law into account, and assume standard sorts of atmospheric pressure and temperature into the equation, this 4.1 tons works out to about a 2200 cubic meter bubble of gas.

A bit more math, average height of a ceiling is approximately 8 ft... and viola. That's a freaking gas bubble about 6 and half stories high. If we superimpose this bubble over a well known building,.. say the White House which peaks at around 60ft to 70 ft in height, it'll look a little bit like this:

Photograph from Library of Congress (link)

And that's just one car, and a small one at that. Even more striking is if you try to visualize the daily emissions of my little car. Here, you end up with 6 cubic meters of the stuff each and every day, which coincidentally is not that far off from the actual physical volume that the car actually inhabits.

"My Civic isn't actually this shiny" or "The rough dimensions of the cube of CO₂ gas my car emits each day".

And then when you consider a commuter's life as looking more and more like this these days:

Well, then maybe you have a problem. And don't forget, remember that each car will release a gas bubble every day, 365 days a year. How many cars on Earth right now? I dunno, a big number. I do know about 63 million were produced in 2005 alone, so whatever the number is, it has a chance to get bigger every year.

And my point is this: I saw all of this craziness because of a website that allows me to look a little more closely at offsetting my emissions, so whether or not the offsetting strategy is good or bad, I definitely got my lesson for the day, and that can't be a bad thing.

Think I'm gonna have to fix up my bike...