Or total tons of co 2 produced in a year by us

­­ or ­­
Total Tons of CO
2
produced in a year by U.S. drivers: # of cars X (# of miles per car / 2000) X pounds of CO
2
per mile
So, what do YOU come up with for this answer?
A) 32,000,000,000 pounds / year (or 16,000,000 tons )
B) 1,680,000,000,000 pounds / year (or 840,000,000 tons )
C) 16,800,000 pounds / year (or 8,400 tons )
D) 16,800 pounds / year (or 8.4 tons )
5.
Pounds of CO
2
per Square Foot of Road per Year Calculation:
There are about 15,000 square miles of paved roads in the U.S. (the roads are long and skinny, but if you took
roads and made them into a giant tennis court, you’d have about 15,000 square miles), or about 15,000 x
5280 x 5280 = 420,000,000,000 square feet (rounding off just a bit).
For this answer, then, simply divide the answer from the previous question (number of pounds of CO
2
per year
produced by U.S. cars) by the total highway square footage number above.
Cheap calculators? You likely won’t be able to type in the number of square feet; in that case, if you calculated
a number of tons (T) in the previous question, you should do T x 2000 / 15,000 / 5280 / 5280, giving an
answer very near to:
6.
Now, imagine that instead of CO
2
, our cars putout horse ploppies that fell on the road. U.S. cars would be
delivering the number of pounds of horse ploppies you just calculated, each year, to each square foot of paved
road in the country. The CO
2
from our cars, if turned to horse ploppies, would make a one­inch­
thick layer spread across all the paved roads in the entire country each year.
Points Earned: 2.0/2.0
Correct Answer(s): B
Points Earned: 2.0/2.0
Correct Answer(s): B

11/8/2016 Exercise #6: Fossil Fuels (& Driving Hazards)
4/4
Just take a moment and think of this—what would happen if you stomped on the accelerator in an inch of
recycled hay? How about braking? After a few decades, would all the roads look like pickup­truck commercials,
with giant sprays of something like mud coming off the tires? Would you enjoy being a pedestrian? Would