Burning Man will be Green

I went to Burning Man again this year, and wow. It was even better than the first time. The art was magnificent, and nearly a week later, even after a business trip in St. Louis talking about stuff that would bore all but the geekiest energy analysts, I'm still buzzing.

A few of our pics


I'm totally fired up over next year's theme, "Green". Of course that could be interpreted in several ways. Green can celebrate nature, represent envy, remind us of money (something you won't see at Burning Man). I think of conservation.

This year, someone calculated the tons of CO2 emitted from burning the man. Would it be startling to learn much fuel is burned and carbon emitted when 40,000 people drive/fly from all over the world to attend the event? Of course those emissions are offset somewhat because all those commuters are parked for a week, and per-capita consumption drops considerably on the playa.

Here's my back-of-the-envelope analysis:

40,000 people arrive in 20,000 vehicles, which travel an average of 800 miles round trip. That's 16 million miles. Most of those vehicles are RV's or packed out SUVs with a pretty low fuel efficiency, say 17 MPG. That's about 940,000 gallons of gasoline. Multiply by 19.4 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas. That works out to about 9,000 tons of CO2.

9,000 tons of CO2 emissons, at $5/ton would cost about $45,000 - or just over $1 per BRC resident, if they choose to offset through an organization called CarbonFund.org. (I don't necessarily endorse them, but it's kinda cool)

Seems like a pretty cheap deal to me - just $1 per resident. Perhaps Burning Man would consider making that an optional contribution addition to the ticket price?

Now about the burning of the "Belgian Waffle"? What an absolutely beautiful structure.

The Burning "Belgian Waffle" While I have some reservations about burning all that would that could have gone to some other use, I'm sure the burn was pretty darn cool.