Letters to todays Times: Councillor Jenny Jones of the Green Party Group on the London Assembly writes “In London alone, homes produce enough CO2 every year to fill almost seven million hot air balloons.”
Why hot air balloons? you don’t use CO2 in hot air balloons because CO2 is heavier than air. Might it be to give a suggestion of unbearable heat? Why not enough CO2 to create an iceberg of incredibly cold frozen dry ice with a surface temperature of -78.5 degrees centigrade?
May 8, 2007
June 4, 2007 at 8:58 pm
It’s not a crapstat, as such, but, we need more information.
How does a household produce CO2? Does she mean the amount of CO2 produced by the power stations that provide the power used by the household? Is it just the burning of gas? Inhabitants exhaling? Tile slates decomposing? Are all hot air balloons the same size? (okay, volume).
I bet she didn’t say what the stat actually meant, which means it’s probably meaningless.
Here’s another stat for you, found here.
http://www.thelondonpaper.com/cs/Satellite/london/info?packedargs=categoryId%3D1157140058986%26date%3Dnull
The Energy Saving Trust has calculated that every household in the UK creates around six tonnes of carbon dioxide every year – enough to fill six balloons, each 10m in diameter.
I’m with you on this. Why a fucking balloon? Why not measure it in, say, shoe boxes. Or condoms or something.