Our Beloved Killer of Planets . . . the Car

They’ll get my car when they pry my cold, dead fingers off . . . .

I love my car. It symbolizes freedom. I can get in and go right now. No waiting on a taxi, Uber, Lyft, bus, train, plane. Get out of a situation. Meet someone. Start over. See other places. This adulation of the car is not 100%. If we polled millions of teenage boys, their desire to take out a high school sweetheart in their own car would cause them to cast a favorable vote for its existence. If we were able to poll the billions of dead frogs on streets after a rainstorm, they might croak a less positive result.

This convenience comes at an incredible price. Not a good incredible, a bad incredible. I’m not talking about just to you and your pocketbook. I’m talking about to the planet and society in general.

Let’s first talk about the energy investment in cars. To do that I’m going to introduce you, if you are not already familiar, to the concept of embodied energy. Embodied energy is the energy used to get that material into the product it is part of. That includes mining, processing, transportation, etc.

On average, 1980 pounds of steel is used in every car. With an embodied energy of 2.55 kWh per pound, there is 4,851 kWh of embodied energy related to steel.

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