The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change

by Charles Wohlforth

Current levels of human energy use bumped up the respiration side of the equation by 8 percent. Fossil fuels multiplied the energy one person could use by many thousands. A human’s daily diet of 2,000 calories equaled 8,000 BTUs of energy, enough to continuously operate a 100-watt lightbulb. A gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 BTUs of energy, more than the human body uses in two weeks. Burning one six-pound gallon of gasoline puts twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into the air, of which five pounds is carbon and the rest is oxygen (we’ll just talk about the carbon, for simplicity). Wood is half carbon, so to recycle the carbon in one gallon of gasoline a tree has to grow by ten pounds. To recycle the carbon released to fly coast to coast round-trip on a passenger jet takes about 1,750 pounds of wood growth for each passenger. The total energy use of the average American loads five tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. A growing forest (not a mature forest) can use about a ton of carbon per acre per year, so to balance the energy use of each American would require about five acres of young, healthy forest. That’s far more forest than we have. More fundamentally, however, forests don’t only grow, they also burn, age, and decay, releasing carbon back to the atmosphere; only if all the forests were cut down regularly and buried deep underground would they really negate carbon taken from underground and put into the atmosphere.