With the Arctic ice melting under him, Santa and his elves have good reason to cut their carbon footprint – but before they can do that, St. Nick has to calculate this hard-to-determine number in the first place.
He’s a little too busy for such an effort at the moment so, to celebrate the Christmas season, the Monitor decided to help him.
Grab your pencil and favorite calculator app, and here we go: How much contribution does Santa’s annual trip make to global warming?
In past Granite Geek columns, I have calculated from the best available data, supplemented by exit interviews and Facebook algorithms, that Santa travels an average of 5.14 million mph during his travels while carrying 250,000 tons of presents in his sleigh. That requires 5 times 10 to the 15th power (i.e., 5,000,000,000,000,000) joules of kinetic energy, assuming I got my exponents right, which equals the energy contained in 30 million gallons of gasoline, about one-tenth the annual gasoline consumption of the U.S.
Wait, there’s more.
Santa can only spend one-5,000th of a second at each home and has to accelerate and decelerate from his maximum speed between each visit, so he consumes that energy 5,000 times every second. And he does this for 15 hours straight, following darkness around the globe to give him more time for visiting all the good little girls and boys.
This means that over the course of his extended Christmas Eve, Santa consumes the energy equivalent of 27 million times the amount of gasoline burned in the United States every year.
Geez, what a gas hog!
Ah, but Santa has an out: He doesn’t burn fossil fuel.
His sleigh uses an octet – on foggy nights, a nonet – of biofuel-powered aerial transportation modules. (This leads to my favorite Christmas physics pun: The sleigh travels so fast that it’s led by Rudolph the Red-Shift Reindeer.)
This power source doesn’t let Santa entirely off the eco-hook, however, since reindeer literally produce greenhouse gasses. Santa magic makes them speedy, but it can’t make them emissions-free.
Reindeer are ruminants, a class of about 150 species of mammals including cows, sheep and goats that eat food we can’t digest because they contain cellulose, such as grasses. They break this food down in multiple stomachs, the first of which is called the rumen (hence “ruminant”).
The breakdown is done by bacteria that produce methane as a byproduct, which is the problem, since methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. Each day, full-grown ruminants release 250 to 500 liters of methane via belching and, if I may be indelicate, farting.
Don’t laugh; this is serious. Domestic cattle release as much as 2 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions from both ends of their digestive system, and research published this month in the journal Environmental Letters said that global methane emissions have spiked in the past few years, much of it from agriculture. That increase has swamped an improvement in carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources, and is part of the reason that the North Pole is surrounded by less and less ice each year.
Anyway, back to the calculation at hand. Using data gathered for cows, we estimate that each of Santa’s nine full-grown reindeer produce the ruminant maximum of 500 liters of methane daily, or one-tenth of a metric ton of carbon, which is the amount of carbon released by 116 gallons of gasoline.
Ergo, the nine reindeer together produce as much carbon as a car using 1,044 gallons of gas.
The average American drives 15,000 miles a year in a 25 mpg car, consuming 600 gallons of gas annually. So, Santa’s reindeer team uses as much carbon during Christmas Eve as a one and two-thirds average American drivers use over the course of a year.
Considering what they accomplish in that time, this is pretty darn good. If Santa was a company, he’d issue a press release saying “We’re helping to save the Earth!” and would paint his sleigh green.
Would that we all were so efficient.
Merry Christmas!
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek)
