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I understand what you say, and I agree for the most part, but it really seems impossible that a two-hour car journey emits more than manufacturing a smartphone.

I understand what you say, and I agree for the most part, but it really seems impossible that a two-hour car journey emits more than manufacturing a smartphone... I mean, building a smartphone involves digging for raw materials, extract them, transport them, assemble them, etc. And i'm not counting the emission during the design process. I know that a two-hour car journey is really not optimized, and that manufacturing phones on a large scale is very optimized, but it seems impossible to me that manufacturing a phone in China from components from all over the world emits less that a good big steak in a restaurant... I that's true, that's incredible.

jdietrich 8y ago
Imagine if you bought gasoline at the grocery store in two-liter bottles. You'd need to buy 31 bottles to fill the tank on a Ford Fusion. Think about what 31 bottles of soda would look like in a shopping cart. Think about the sheer effort of filling your cart with 31 bottles, pushing it to the parking lot and pouring the contents into your gas tank. Someone had to build a giant platform in the ocean, drill a hole deep into the ground, pump the oil out of the ground and move it ashore, boil it in a giant distiller to extract the gasoline, pump it into a tanker and drive it to your gas station. All of that stuff is invisible, but you notice the gram of polythene wrapping on a cucumber. A phone is an incredibly sophisticated device, but it's only a few ounces of stuff. It cost you $700, so it feels like it should involve a huge amount of natural resources to make. It required a lot of human skill and ingenuity, but we didn't need to burn a lot of stuff to make it. When you fill up your tank with $50 of unleaded, you don't think about the huge volume of pure hydrocarbons you're pouring into your car or the immensely energy-intensive processes needed to extract, refine and transport that fuel. When you get on a plane, you don't think about the fact that almost the entire volume of the wings are filled with fuel that'll be burned in a single journey. When your heating thermostat clicks on, you don't think about the volume of gas rushing through a network of pipes to feed your boiler.

jdietrich 8y ago

Imagine if you bought gasoline at the grocery store in two-liter bottles. You'd need to buy 31 bottles to fill the tank on a Ford Fusion. Think about what 31 bottles of soda would look like in a shopping cart. Think about the sheer effort of filling your cart with 31 bottles, pushing it to the parking lot and pouring the contents into your gas tank. Someone had to build a giant platform in the ocean, drill a hole deep into the ground, pump the oil out of the ground and move it ashore, boil it in a giant distiller to extract the gasoline, pump it into a tanker and drive it to your gas station. All of that stuff is invisible, but you notice the gram of polythene wrapping on a cucumber. A phone is an incredibly sophisticated device, but it's only a few ounces of stuff. It cost you $700, so it feels like it should involve a huge amount of natural resources to make. It required a lot of human skill and ingenuity, but we didn't need to burn a lot of stuff to make it. When you fill up your tank with $50 of unleaded, you don't think about the huge volume of pure hydrocarbons you're pouring into your car or the immensely energy-intensive processes needed to extract, refine and transport that fuel. When you get on a plane, you don't think about the fact that almost the entire volume of the wings are filled with fuel that'll be burned in a single journey. When your heating thermostat clicks on, you don't think about the volume of gas rushing through a network of pipes to feed your boiler.