Back of the Envelope Carbon Footprint for Burning Man

Like guessing number of jelly beans in a big jar, I think 30,000 tons of CO2 is created by the Burning Man festival.

Here's my logic:
Assume 50,000 participants, 20,000 cars, on average drive say 600 miles round trip.

That's 12 million miles of driving, 600,000 gallons of gas - 6,600 tons CO2 emissions

Add to that thousands of pounds of propane burned, gasoline used by hundreds of art cars on the playa, fuel needed to transport and process the waste from our temporary city, air travel for those out-of-area guests, generators for those killer sound systems, fuel used at BRC airport (more than 100 planes came in I heard), and of course burning of the man, the temple, the oilderrick, and other art installations and camp fires.

Let's just round up to 15,000 tons CO2. And to be very conservative, I'll double that estimate again to cover the impact of creating and shipping 400,000 plastic goo-filled glow sticks from China (I have no idea what those things really are, but they can't be good for the environment), and untold numbers of trips to wal mart for baby wipes, home depot for rebar, haight street for fishnet stocking and hot pants, and goodwill for that perfect faux fur coat.

Call it 30,000 tons CO2.

If a power plant creates 0.5 tons CO2/MWh, then the equivalent CO2 generated by burning man was approximately equivalent to 60,000 MWh of power generation.

That's one large (500 MW) coal-fired power plant running for about 5 days, coincidentally about the length of the festival.