Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hi,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm ruin vogel Bomb and this is another
Speaker 1: classic episode from the incredible past. This one has to
Speaker 1: do with your personal carbon footprint and how it may
Speaker 1: stack up against your favorite superheroes. Hey, they're brain Stuff
Speaker 1: luring vogel Bomb here. If you're out there saving humanity
Speaker 1: from supervillains, doesn't matter how many pounds of carbon you
Speaker 1: used to do it. Gotham City would have been obliterated
Speaker 1: a hundred times over if Batman weren't constantly bailing it
Speaker 1: out of trouble. But that batmobile sure is a gas guzzler,
Speaker 1: not to mention the Batwing airplane, and the electricity bill
Speaker 1: for the bat Cave is probably astronomical. So is all
Speaker 1: that do gooding really doing good after all? Some researchers
Speaker 1: from Stanford University presented a poster at the American Geophysical
Speaker 1: Unions Fall Meeting entitled Stop Saving the Planet Carbon Accounting
Speaker 1: of Superheroes and their impacts on climate change. The point
Speaker 1: of the project was to bring awareness to the fact
Speaker 1: that everybody on this planet has a carbon footprint, which
Speaker 1: is a calculation of how much carbon each of us
Speaker 1: uses in our daily activities such as driving, eating, and
Speaker 1: heating and cooling our houses. The average Americans carbon footprint
Speaker 1: is around forty four pounds. That's about of carbon per year.
Speaker 1: An average person in the United Arab Emirates uses a
Speaker 1: good bit more, and the average Peruvian uses considerably less.
Speaker 1: But what about your average superhero Well, according to the study,
Speaker 1: they're all over the map. Take Superman. According to the comics,
Speaker 1: the Man of Steel is entirely solar powered, which nets
Speaker 1: him a carbon footprint of zero. Bless him. Jessica Jones
Speaker 1: probably comes in slightly below the average Americans carbon use
Speaker 1: thanks to her small Brooklyn apartment and reliance on public
Speaker 1: transportation and swamp thing, what with his power to make
Speaker 1: plants grow, might actually have a negative carbon footprint. That's
Speaker 1: not the case for every good Samaritan in a cape, however.
Speaker 1: The Oracle firstwhile bat girl turned computer packer might weigh
Speaker 1: in at a conservative estimate of one and fifty one
Speaker 1: thousand pounds or sixty eight ms, but the figure might
Speaker 1: be as high as thirty two million pounds or a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty five million kilograms, depending on how many
Speaker 1: servers she's running. Even Iron Man, who makes a concerted
Speaker 1: effort to employ green energy sources would come in higher
Speaker 1: than the average American because of the sheer amount of
Speaker 1: tech that he uses and the flash, who can run
Speaker 1: near the speed of light, might require an insane number
Speaker 1: of calories to accomplish this feat, possibly as much as
Speaker 1: eighty nine million pounds or forty five million kilograms worth
Speaker 1: of carbon. But isn't this kind of a silly question
Speaker 1: for serious scientists to spend their time exploring? Poster co
Speaker 1: author Miles trey Er, a post doctoral researcher at Stanford,
Speaker 1: told EOS, if I calculate my own carbon footprint, that's depressing.
Speaker 1: If I calculate Batman's carbon footprint, that's hilarious. So let's
Speaker 1: go with the hilarious. It's a way of tricking people
Speaker 1: into learning. Next, Trayer is setting his sights on the
Speaker 1: carbon footprint of supervillains. One of my favorites, he said,
Speaker 1: is Mr. Freeze, because refrigeration carries a pretty horrendous carbon footprint.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Jesslyn Shields and produced by
Speaker 1: Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other super topics, visit how Stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio or more podcasts.
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