I produced a video to illustrate the carbon footprint of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. For the record, it is 665 million pounds of carbon dioxide per year. If you are curious about the details of the mathematical calculations I refer you to those rocket scientists at NASA. Vehicles in general produce a pound of CO2 per mile. (An ounce per block…)

The San Francisco Bay Bridge is a seven mile long crossing. Once you know the number of motor vehicles using it every year (95,000,000) the carbon footprint is easily computed. In case you are interested in more info about this amazing infrastructure I refer you to the State of California Agency which has a great website about the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Nice pictures and relevant facts.

Enjoy the video.

This is an alternative with sound.

The sound track is very dramatic. Adds another dimension to this crucial message.

665 Million pounds of Carbon Dioxide is a huge number. It has to do with chemistry. Only the powerful carbon component comes from the gasoline. The heavier oxygen atoms come from the air. They combine in the engine of the car exiting through the exhaust pipe as CO2. It is invisible, has no distinct odor and is fairly hard to perceive.

So, chemically speaking, the gasoline is contributing just over a quarter (27%) of the weight in this potent greenhouse gas. In fact, a gallon of petrol weights 6.3 pounds yet when combusted it will produce 20 pounds of CO2. That’s just Chem 101. But the CO2 is the product and if it were rocks or coal it would take 3,325 railroad hopper cars at 100 tons each to transport that much raw weight.

Cars, in general, burn gasoline, not coal. Coal is just a handy visual metaphor to attempt to describe the extraordinary mass and volume of the invisible greenhouse gas CO2. So how much gasoline is burnt every day on average by cars on the Bay Bridge? Once you know that a gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO2 it is easy to figure out the answer to that question: approximately 90,000 gallons per day.

So we burn 90,000 gallons of gasoline every day moving 260,000 cars across the seven mile long San Francisco Bay Bridge crossing. Doing this every day for the entire year produces 665 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

Locally we call this transportation. But scientists working in the poles, places like Greenland and Antarctica call it geoengineering and they are unanimous in saying that it must stop immediately.