Human Footprint Part 6
Science
The Human Footprint on Earth
Built house than they're still all the things you need to furnish it. The average new Homer spends nearly $9000 on furnishings and decorations. Just think about it, there are carpets and rugs, tables and chairs, a sofa, and things to hang on the wall, as well as curtains and all the accessories. We love to spend, we love to shop. And we buy loads and loads of stuff. There are all the appliances that washing machine and dryer. The stove, the oven, microwave, iron, and vacuum cleaner.
Take a washing machine, nothing to get excited about, but we depend on it and then one day it breaks down. Or we just want a better one. So we throw the old one out and buy a new one. We'll do that 7 times. The same with refrigerators will own 5 of them and to keep our cool will go through 7 air conditioners. We'll buy 8 microwaves. Ten TV sets and 15 computers. To get an idea of how they all stack up, we have mounted them against a wall. Even when you see just a part of all the goods we collect, it becomes a revelation. It takes a lot of coal to make the electricity to fuel all these appliances. Over half our electricity comes from one of 600 coal burning power stations. Coal is a fossil fuel containing between 40 and 90% carbon when it is burned it releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which can build up in the atmosphere trapping in heat and changing our climate.
The average American creates 22 tons of carbon dioxide emission every year. It's a lot more than the worldwide average of 6 tons, but a few small changes could make a big difference in our energy consumption. If we just lower our thermostat, 2° in the winter time, and raise it 2° in the summertime, we could each save 2000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. Carbon dioxide is invisible, but this is what 2000 pounds of carbon, coal looks like. By replacing just one bulb with an energy efficient one we can save half a ton of carbon dioxide over the bulb's lifetime. If every household in America were to do this, we could prevent 500 million tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere.
Each of us can save another half a ton of carbon emissions each year, simply by unplugging our appliances when we're not using them. There are a lot of ways we can reduce our carbon footprint. For more ideas, visit our website at WWW dot NatGeo human footprint dot com. Appliances drive our world, they're everywhere and there's never a shortage of new inventions to improve our lives. Take the computer. 20 years ago, it had barely made an impact. Now, more than 574 million of them are sold, worldwide, every year. At least 100 million computers belong to Americans, and it takes a wide range of materials and resources to make each one of them.
Hundreds of computers are imported every day through vast warehouses like this one. While they're getting smaller, the guts of a computer along with a plastic and metal case leave a heavy footprint to make a single desktop it requires at least 530 pounds of fossil fuels and 48 pounds of assorted chemicals. Add to that 1.7 tons of water used in production and all of a sudden your little desktop weighs a lot. But it's hard to imagine life without them. Online shopping helps us save gasoline email makes us more time efficient.
Computers help us design and manufacture things. You could even say they control us. And when you look at the bigger picture, they do. Our traffic systems, our navigation systems, our communication systems, our work systems, our finance systems, you name it a computer runs it. So while we download music off the Internet or sort out our photos, our desktops and laptops have become everyday parts of our lives. We use them to keep in touch with our friends across the world. We use them for shopping for information for entertainment. But what about all the other things we do?
How long do we spend reading a newspaper or watching the television and how do they affect our human footprint? And then when we have fun and start consuming like there's no tomorrow, like on Thanksgiving or the 4th of July, what impact will all that have? We are following the journey of a lifetime at toddler age we've looked at all the milk will drink in our lifetime. And at school age we've seen a lifetime supply of bananas and oranges. We've looked at the teenage years and seen all the showers we will take, and all the cleansing products we will use. When our couple reached their 20s, we saw our lifetime supply of beer. And all the clothing we will buy. And we've laid out some of the appliances and household goods we will accumulate throughout our lives.
Our couple have already built the foundations of their lives together, and now it's ten years later. They're in their 30s. They have two children and have bought a bigger house. But we don't solely consume food and materials. We continually absorb information and culture, and like most of us, that means watching television. Even with our computers, we trust and depend on our televisions to bring the world into our living rooms. The average home has at least two TV sets and the average American watches four hours per day.
Over a lifetime that's more than 12 and a half years sped sitting in front of the tube. When you watch the screen, you are never alone, because across the country there are another 285 million television sets. 12 years of TV watching burns more than 22,000 kW of electricity, enough to power a lightbulb for 43 years. Despite the popularity of television, it hasn't quite managed to kill off the written word. It's been estimated that at least 32 million books have been published over the last 2000 years. And today, a book is published somewhere in the world every 30 seconds. The average American will polish off almost 6 books a year.