This morning I was sent a link to an amazing collection of art by Chris Jordan called Running The Numbers. The thumbnail of the detail view to the right really doesn’t do it justice either – you have to see the full size image to understand exactly what this image is. What it represents is 28,000 42-gallon oil drum: the amount of oil consumed in the US every 2 minutes.

And then keep looking at the other images in the collection. Others that stood out for me were:

• One hundred million toothpicks, representing the number of trees cut down to support the junk mail business (what a total waste);
• One million plastic cups: the number used on US airlines every 6 hours;
• Two million plastic bottles: the number used in the US every 5 minutes (that’s an amazing 576 million bottles a day!);
• 426,000 cell phones being “retired” every day in the US (most probably still working perfectly);
• 1.14 million brown paper bags: the number used every hour in the US;
• And finally, 60,000 plastic bags: the number used every 5 seconds in the US (that is over 1 billion every day).

In addition to the environmental issues represented by these numbers I’ve highlighted, there are also other social issues in the collection, including an image representing smoking, healthcare and even the issue of prisoners, both in the US and in US run detention facilities outside the US.

Light Bulbs

One image though I have a slight disagreement with: the image of 320,000 light bulbs floating in space. Said to be equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.). The issue I have with this statement is that it is missing the real solution to this problem. The solution is not for consumers to unplug everything. The solution requires two parts:

1. More equipment designed to really use a lot less power when in sleep mode;
2. More electricity being generated from clean and renewable sources.

The second of those is perhaps the most important. Once we can produce enough electricity from clean renewable resources, why shouldn’t we use it to make our quality of life better? Sure, cutting consumption helps keep the bills low, and in the short term, while the world still depends heavily on dirty coal, and other non-renewable resources for our electricity, will help reduce emissions. But the logical extrapolation of that argument is to say that we should just stop using electricity completely. That’s a stupid argument. Much better to talk about how we can use technology to bring our clean generation levels in line with our consumption needs. Sure, don’t waste electricity unnecessarily, but the Vertography position is one of moderation. Sleep mode, done correctly, is a useful compromise, and better than just leaving the kit on all the time!

One of the reasons for the recent silence here in the Vertography blog has been a short trip we took back home to the UK. While there, we also took a side trip down to the beautiful city of Venice, in Italy, for a few days. As a result, we booked two return flights: one between San Francisco and London, and one between London and Venice.

When booking the trans-Atlantic flight, on United Airlines, we were offered the choice to pay for upgrades and given links to partners for booking cars and hotels, but nothing more. When we booked the Venice flights with EasyJet, a UK based low cost carrier, right there on the booking page, in addition to other offers, we were offered the option to buy carbon offsets for our flight.

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Over at eRedux you can take a look at the carbon output of each state in the US and compare them. If you click through in to the detail for any state you will get detailed information about each state.

The top two states in terms of absolute carbon output are Texas (670 million tons) and California (389 million tons), but the per-capita numbers are very different with Texans producing almost 3 times as much CO2 as Californians.

Top 5 & Bottom 5 States
This section of the chart shows the best 5 states in terms of per capita carbon output:

And this one shows the five worst performing states in terms of per capita carbon output:

In what is perhaps the strangest article I remember reading in the UK Telegraph, it seems that Argentine scientists have been looking into the methane gas produced by cattle.

The Telegraph article claims the researchers at the Argentine National Institute of Agricultural Technology estimate that every cow produces 800-1000 litres of emissions every day. With 55 million heads of cattle grazing in Argentina, these emissions could amount to as much as 30% of the countries greenhouse gas emissions (and methane is 23 times worse than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat).