A gallon of gasoline has more energy than a month's manual labor!

Submitted by Legitimate_Proof t3_11cicuh in vermont

Gasoline, diesel, and other fossil fuels are incredibly "energy dense," they have an unbelievable amount of energy in them. A gallon of gasoline has around 35 kWh of energy. Diesel has about 12% more energy per gallon. Humans can do work at up to 300 Watts, but sustained output is lower: "Over an 8-hour work shift, an average, healthy, well-fed and motivated manual laborer may sustain an output of around 75 watts of power." 75 Watts x 8 hr per day / 1000 kWh per Wh = 0.6 kWh per day. 35 kWh / 0.6 kWh per day = 58 days!

One way to check if this is true is to think how long it would take you to pull or push your vehicle the same distance it can go on one gallon. You probably can't, but it's the same energy if you imagine 5 people doing it in 1/5 the time. Thinking about it this way, gasoline is really cheap! This has allowed us to travel more than ever before and to build a sprawling economy that is out of scale with nature and human evolution.

Electricity is amazing too! Considering that 0.6 kWh per day that a well-fed and motivated worker can output, even with higher electricity prices recently, paying $0.20/kWh would mean that day's manual labor only cost about 12 cents! Compare that 0.6 kWh per day of possible human output with how much electricity you use per day.

Transportation and travel and are the most out of whack with the world's resources. Another way to visualize it is through horsepower since that's a measure that literally means the power output of one horse. (Above, we used 75 Watts as one humanpower, a horsepower is 746 Watts.) The engines in modern cars and trucks have hundreds of horsepower, but unless you're using full throttle, you are using less power. We can visualize the energy is a smaller number of horses, maybe 20 for a small car and 40 for a pickup. If you imagine replacing every car, on the road and parked, with that many horses, you see how we often wouldn't have enough room for that. Horses were a natural and renewable transportation system, while gasoline and diesel have allowed us to casually go well beyond natural and renewable.

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BilliamBaggins t1_ja35ca2 wrote

Are you from 100 years ago and trying to sell me on the promise of this new mechanical horse? Trying to convince me that a gallon of gas could beat me up? Is there some inside joke on this sub I'm not getting?

What's happening?

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Nanotude t1_ja3cn9d wrote

A pound of pure cane sugar also contains huge amount of energy. But smart humans do not get all of their energy exclusively from cane sugar, since doing so would be very harmful to their health.

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Legitimate_Proof OP t1_ja3dfzj wrote

Replying to BilliamBaggins (#2,023,979)

>Are you from 100 years ago and trying to sell me on the promise of this new mechanical horse?

No.

>Trying to convince me that a gallon of gas could beat me up?

Not my intent, but yes it could.

> Is there some inside joke on this sub I'm not getting?

Not that I know of.

>What's happening?

Humans are destroying the world. I'm trying to provide different points of comparison than the usual debate.

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Legitimate_Proof OP t1_ja3dkz6 wrote

Replying to VTtree (#2,025,328)

What? It's true the post is not specific to Vermont, but as a state that drives more than average, and where policies to reduce fossil fuels are controversial, it seems relevant.

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Legitimate_Proof OP t1_ja3evf9 wrote

Replying to builtforcameron (#2,025,187)

You could look at it this way. It would be a mess to use horses for the amount of transportation we do today. The way we do it today doesn't have less impact than doing it with horses would, but our way hides the impact. Hides it in places like "Cancer Alley" where oil refining and other factories cause the cancer rate to be 50x higher than normal. Hides it in climate change.

Hides it in deaths and injuries from crashes, in which we often blame the victim, and view as unavoidable. Hides it in obesity and the other health problems related to our lack of exercise. Using cars for all trips is related to several of the top causes of death in the US. I'm not saying we should walk everywhere instead (or ride horses) but some walking is helpful. Part of why Europeans are healthier is because they walk a few blocks to and from transit daily, whereas we only walk a few steps to get into and out our cars.

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QualityRescue t1_ja3r2hr wrote

Are you okay? Are you getting the care you need?

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BilliamBaggins t1_ja3u3uw wrote

Replying to Legitimate_Proof (#2,025,606)

>No

Glad we cleared that up. Time travel has terrifying implications.

>Not my intent, but yes it could.

Good to know.

>Not that I know of.

Thank goodness. Those "whoosh" moments are so embarrassing.

>Humans are destroying the world. I'm trying to provide different points of comparison than the usual debate.

Now I'm with you there. I just fail to see how touting the the wonder of gasoline helps move that debate forward, unless I'm missing the point? If you're arguing that manual labor is insignificant compared to fossil fuel power and using it as a reference to show how powerful other renewable sources of energy need to be, it's an interesting perspective.

I guess in short I'm not sure where you were headed with this.

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Legitimate_Proof OP t1_ja3y36s wrote

Replying to BilliamBaggins (#2,028,640)

I thought that if I had said "stop driving novelty-sized vanity trucks because it's selfish and wasteful," or "stop driving and flying so much" we'd get into the normal fights about climate change: personal action vs corporations and the government, and VT's impact vs China's, etc.

I wanted to add a perspective to those conversations in the future, and to people complaining about the cost of energy, that it's objectively cheap. People only compare it to what the price used to be, which may not be a meaningful comparison, and to the price of other fuels. That is what this post is doing, by saying we pay much less than manual labor. That allows us to do too much. So the main point was that sense of scale. Even our everyday lives are out of scale. Out of scale with what the earth can provide. To me that inspires climate action.

But I did think the post was too long and probably making too many different points. Without the context that I think that what humans did for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, without ruining the world, should be a point of comparison. Not that we should return to that lifestyle but it gives us the scale that keeps things in balance.

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builtforcameron t1_ja3zome wrote

Replying to Legitimate_Proof (#2,025,864)

I think I understand this post now, it was really hard to find any specific point you were making but I totally get it AND agree with you. Growing up in Rutland county I had to drive about 15 mins to work and school, even longer to hang out with friends and do other fun things like swimming holes etc. Now that I live in Burlington I absolutely relish in the fact that I can walk to the grocery store. We definitely need to walk places more, but the big issue is how do we build up our urban areas to be more affordable to live in? Rutland has so much sprawl, Burlington continued to get flooded with UVMers. I appreciate your perspective though, for future research I'd recommend looking into the differences between electric and fossil fuel heating. Then call your reps and senators, theres a super important bill called the Affordable Heat Act making its way through the state house. Keep an eye on it

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Legitimate_Proof OP t1_ja483a2 wrote

Replying to Nanotude (#2,025,464)

Right! Do people think I'm promoting fossil fuels? I'm saying the amount of energy is so high, it is shocking and we should use not waste them in vehicles that are 1-3% efficient. We should use them more carefully, only for things that need very high energy density.

Trying to avoid getting into a conservative vs progressive fight, I just introduced the scale comparison, which I assume people didn't know, and said it's out of proportion:

>sprawling economy that is out of scale with nature and human evolution.
>
>...
>
>out of whack with the world's resources.
>
>...
>
>allowed us to casually go well beyond natural and renewable.

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patonbike t1_ja4cox1 wrote

For sure as a cyclist I can appreciate a watt. A single kWh ride is a pretty epic for anyone except a true pro (5 hours at 200 watts)!

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vtdadbod007 t1_ja4ixe8 wrote

Alright mods how the fuck is this about Vermont

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o08 t1_ja5632n wrote

I would love stationary bikes in your house to be hooked up to the grid. Instead of miles biked, you can see kWh’s produced. Won’t save much money but it will add motivation to work out. Avoiding a heart attack is the cherry.

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FourteenthCylon t1_ja6047s wrote

But I’ve never done a month’s manual labor.

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wampastompa09 t1_ja676p0 wrote

Too bad the way we use that energy is so inefficient. Less that 30-40% of that gallon of fuel burned is actually put to use, and the rest is lost to byproducts of combustion.

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Zane42v2 t1_ja6j06o wrote

I think you think you’re making a case to stop using fossil fuels, but in reality you’re making a case to continue using fossil fuels.

You’ve just proven a farmer could never match the work of his tractor by hiring extra farm hands or using animals.

The same for moving goods, conveying people, etc.

The solution to problems isn’t to radically eliminate whole sectors of products or expect people to radically change how they operate, it’s to displace a shitty tech with a superior and greener one.

100 something years ago the impending doom crisis was we didn’t have anywhere to put all the horse shit, and if people kept buying horses at the rate they were, we were a decade away from every populated city being 6 feet deep in horse shit. Attempts to make people walk and stop using buggy’s didn’t go anywhere. The automobile was invented and the problem evaporated.

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