Human Carbon Units
September 24, 2024
by William P. Meyers

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8 billion times anything is a lot

Here I will consider human beings as carbon units. This is not to deny that humans are complex, and society is complex. It is to illuminate an aspect of this complexity.

Globally, the average weight of a human being is about 136 pounds or 62 kilograms. Note that U.S. citizens tend to be heavier, at 181 pounds or 82 kilograms. A typical human being is more than half oxygen. Carbon comes in second with 18.5% of human mass. As a result the typical global human content of carbon is near 25 pounds or 11.5 kilograms. About the same as a small sack of coal.

Compare that to 10 gallons of gasoline. That typically would weigh about in with about 55 pounds of pure carbon. So if a person burns about 5 gallons of gas driving a car by themselves, they also burn 27.5 pounds of carbon, or about their own body weight if they are typical of the global weight.

If a typical person is buried about 25 pounds of carbon is returned to the earth. If they are cremated, the carbon contributes to global warming by becoming carbon dioxide.

Where did the 25 pounds of carbon per individual come from? Not from breathing in carbon dioxide. Instead humans, like cars, consume carbon, in the form of food, to produce energy or to build up our bodies. Vegetarians and oil company shills point to cows as the real problem for greenhouse gas production, but every human is constantly converting food to carbon dioxide. And the occasional methane.

As far as scientists can tell, this was not a problem as long as the global population was less than about 1 billion, which it was until about the year 1800. True, a billion people would have contained about 25 billion pounds of carbon, but they were dying at about the same rate they were being born. Human carbon was just part of the natural carbon cycle. The industrial revolution, which started in England, was a tipping point. Coal began to be burned in ever greater quantities. People began having more children survive. At first the upward slope was gradual. Then with modern medicine and industrialized food production the human population boomed.

There are over 8 billion individual humans alive today, according to those who count such things. 8 times 25 is 200. A billion times anything is a billion. 8 billion times twenty five pounds per Human Carbon Unit is 200 billion pounds. 91 billion kilograms. 100 million tons.

True, that is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated global emissions of greenhouse gasses, about 38 billion tons. Since that is mostly carbon dioxide, it is less than one-third carbon.

Humans produce all of that, one way or another.

It is time to put more Human Carbon Units in the ground. Produce less new Human Carbon Units. Allow the world go back to a natural balance.

See also Wonderful World of One Billion

See also Provisional Government of Earth