Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hi, brain Stuff, I'm ruin vogel Bomb and this is another classic episode from the incredible past. This one has to do with your personal carbon footprint and how it may stack up against your favorite superheroes. Hey, they're brain Stuff luring vogel Bomb here. If you're out there saving humanity from supervillains, doesn't matter how many pounds of carbon you
used to do it. Gotham City would have been obliterated a hundred times over if Batman weren't constantly bailing it out of trouble. But that batmobile sure is a gas guzzler, not to mention the Batwing airplane, and the electricity bill for the bat Cave is probably astronomical. So is all that do gooding really doing good after all? Some researchers from Stanford University presented a poster at the American Geophysical Unions Fall Meeting entitled Stop Saving the Planet Carbon Accounting
of Superheroes and their impacts on climate change. The point of the project was to bring awareness to the fact that everybody on this planet has a carbon footprint, which is a calculation of how much carbon each of us uses in our daily activities such as driving, eating, and heating and cooling our houses. The average Americans carbon footprint is around forty four pounds. That's about of carbon per year.
An average person in the United Arab Emirates uses a good bit more, and the average Peruvian uses considerably less. But what about your average superhero Well, according to the study, they're all over the map. Take Superman. According to the comics, the Man of Steel is entirely solar powered, which nets
him a carbon footprint of zero. Bless him. Jessica Jones probably comes in slightly below the average Americans carbon use thanks to her small Brooklyn apartment and reliance on public transportation and swamp thing, what with his power to make plants grow, might actually have a negative carbon footprint. That's not the case for every good Samaritan in a cape, however.
The Oracle firstwhile bat girl turned computer packer might weigh in at a conservative estimate of one and fifty one thousand pounds or sixty eight ms, but the figure might be as high as thirty two million pounds or a hundred and forty five million kilograms, depending on how many
servers she's running. Even Iron Man, who makes a concerted effort to employ green energy sources would come in higher than the average American because of the sheer amount of tech that he uses and the flash, who can run near the speed of light, might require an insane number of calories to accomplish this feat, possibly as much as eighty nine million pounds or forty five million kilograms worth of carbon. But isn't this kind of a silly question
for serious scientists to spend their time exploring? Poster co author Miles trey Er, a post doctoral researcher at Stanford, told EOS, if I calculate my own carbon footprint, that's depressing. If I calculate Batman's carbon footprint, that's hilarious. So let's go with the hilarious. It's a way of tricking people into learning. Next, Trayer is setting his sights on the
carbon footprint of supervillains. One of my favorites, he said, is Mr. Freeze, because refrigeration carries a pretty horrendous carbon footprint. Today's episode was written by Jesslyn Shields and produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other super topics, visit how Stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio or more podcasts. My heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.