This is today's Hartmann Report, published by Substack:
Hairdryer Climate Mathematics RevealedOur hairdryer math gets really bizarre when we apply it to global warming |
By THOM HARTMANN
Most
people know that a hairdryer draws about as much power as your average modern
outlet will give it — typically around 1000 watts or, at 110 volts, just shy of
10 amps. (Plug in and turn on two hairdryers from the same outlet and you’ll
usually blow a circuit breaker: most homes max out at 15 or 20 amp circuits.)
If those numbers are gibberish to you, hang on: it’ll all have
meaning in a moment, particularly when I get to the really shocking part about
climate change and hairdryers.
I was
recently listening to a rightwing radio talk show host trashing electric cars
and the need for them (he was also denying climate change) and he went into
this rant about how if everybody in America bought an electric car, charging
them would “take down the entire country’s power grid.”
This assertion
is, to be charitable, BS. But since we all know what a hairdryer is and have,
at least, a sense for how much power one typically uses — the equivalent of ten
100-watt light bulbs — let’s convert an electric car’s power usage into
hairdryers.
A typical
electric car using a 110 volt home charger pulls about the same amount of
electricity when it’s charging as does a hairdryer: between 800 and 1200 watts,
or 8 to 12 amps, with an average of 10 amps or around 1000 watts per hour (one
kilowatt-hour).
So, charging your car is about the same as running a hairdryer,
our new unit of measurement.
The
average electric car travels 100 miles on around 30 kilowatts
(30,000 watts or 30 “hairdryer-hours”) of electricity (Tesla Model 3 only uses
25, the Chevy Bolt 29), while the average driver in America travels around 1000 miles a month or 33 miles
a day: roughly 10 kilowatts or 10 hairdryer hours a day to cover those 33
miles.
So the
average driver charging their car overnight for ten hours (to replenish that 10
kilowatts of electricity to travel 33 miles) will use the same amount of
electricity as running a single hairdryer for 10 hours.
First off, you can see how silly it is to argue it would “take
down the grid” if every family in America were to turn on a single hairdryer in
their home for 10 hours every night, the equivalent of everybody recharging 33
miles worth of driving every day.
Particularly because most of that charging is done overnight,
when electric demand is lower than normal.
(The
average cost of electricity in the US, by the way, is $.10 per kilowatt hour, or ten cents per
“hairdryer hour.” So, simple math suggests it costs about $3 to drive 100 miles
— 30 “hairdryer hours” worth of electricity x 10 cents per hour — in the
average electric car. For comparison, in the average 25 mpg gas-powered car that same 100
miles would consume 4 gallons of gasoline, costing around $16 at four dollars a
gallon.)
But our hairdryer math gets really bizarre when we apply it to
global warming.
Our planet
isn’t warming because we’re all running hairdryers or even cars or home
furnaces; it’s warming because the greenhouse gasses we’re pouring into the
atmosphere from
generating electricity, heating our homes, and driving our gas-powered cars are
acting like a giant blanket, trapping heat from the sun in the atmosphere.
In other words, we are not warming the Earth (at least not
significantly) with the heat we’re adding: it’s the greenhouse gasses
(principally carbon dioxide) that are warming the Earth by trapping heat
from the sun that would otherwise radiate out into space.
A new
study published this week in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences
found that our oceans — which absorb about 90 percent of the increased heat in
the atmosphere from global warming — took in and held an absolutely massive
amount of solar energy last year.
As Damian Carrington, the Environment Editor at The Guardian,
put it in a recent article summarizing that
new study:
“The
oceans absorbed about 10 zettajoules more heat in 2022 than in 2021, equivalent
to every person on Earth running 40 hairdryers all day, every day.”
Clearly, all 8 billion of us aren’t anywhere close to
using the power equivalent of 40 hairdryers all day, every day. But that’s the
amount of extra energy our planet is trapping every year at our
current rate of energy consumption because greenhouse gasses are so very
efficient at trapping solar heat.
As a
result, our oceans are warming. And that’s driving “atmospheric rivers,”
derechos, “bomb cyclones,” and a whole variety of other atmospheric phenomenons
we’d never seen or even heard of before the past decade or two.
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Again, it’s not our energy use that’s driving this. It’s the
carbon waste byproduct — mostly CO2 — of the fossil fuels we’re burning
to create that energy that’s doing most of it.
If we were
simply capturing all our energy from the sun and wind, that blanket of
greenhouse gasses wouldn’t keep growing, the heat wouldn’t continue
accumulating, and our atmosphere might stabilize (assuming — and it’s not a
safe assumption — that we haven’t already passed tipping points that can’t be
reversed).
By the
1970s it was common knowledge across the scientific community that these
greenhouse gasses — particularly CO2 and methane — were warming our planet. As
you can see from the graphic above, it became irrefutable by the 1990s.
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter pointed to this knowledge and
these trends and took action to try to stop the crisis the world is now
experiencing.
“The
energy crisis is real,” Carter told the nation. “It is worldwide. It is a
clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face
them.
“What I
have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important.
“Point
one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United
States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than
we did in 1977 -- never.”
He declared a national crisis that year and proposed legislation
to create:
“[T]his
nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20
percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”
Tragically
for America and the world, it all came crashing down 43 years ago this month
when the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter,
killed the solar bank and the solar bond program, and even took Carter’s solar
panels off the roof of the White House.
Reagan embraced the fossil fuel industry with gusto (and they
embraced him back), promoting climate deniers like James Watt to head the
Department of the Interior (which oversees oil, gas, and coal drilling and
mining), and Neil Gorsuch’s mother, Anne Gorsuch, to head the EPA.
Simultaneously, the fossil fuel industry began throwing millions
of dollars a year into sellout scientists and climate deniers while pouring
billions around the world into politicians and political campaigns.
As a
result, we actually increased
our consumption of fossil fuels — and the fossil fuel industry made hundreds of
billions in profits. Our World in Data summarizes it well:
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Electric
cars are a huge step forward because they don’t consume fossil fuels
(transportation is our second-largest producer of greenhouse gasses), but most
of our world’s electricity is still produced using coal, oil, or natural gas.
President Carter tried to save America — and lead the world away
— from the climate disasters that are killing millions of people around the
world every year. The fossil fuel industry and the Republican Party killed his
efforts here, as have “conservative” political parties and the fossil fuel
industry all around the world.
It’s
gotten too late to consider this anything other than a potential Armageddon.
We’ve
reached the crisis point where we can no longer afford anything even close to
business as usual. This is a climate emergency.
Yet here
in America the Republican Party continues to deny climate change and Republican
politicians do everything they can to block green and renewable fuels, all in
service to a grotesque industry that makes billions in profits every year from
killing our planet.
But we are
not without solutions.
Heating our houses and places of business, for example,
represents our biggest use of fossil fuels. Yet in Urbana Illinois, Vancouver Canada, and across Germany they’re building homes that are so
efficient they can be… wait for it… heated with a single hairdryer.
A new and
better world is possible,
if we can only overcome the money of the fossil fuel industry, the corruption
of a political party, and stop squandering the little remaining time we have
before, if we don’t act, climate disasters overwhelm civilization.
