I had a previous post title Google Oops, and since I pointed out that folly, I may as well point out that I too make mistakes. Though hopefully not too often, except for grammatical ones.

Now, I admit that I made a mistake in NASCAR Contribution to CO2 Emissions. My mistake was that I couldn’t use a calculator. I don’t think that there was anything wrong with my methodology. It was just a quick order of magnitude calculation. My new results, as shown in the comments of the previous post were

[NASCAR uses] 477,300 gallons of fuel used per year… the mass of CO2 emitted by the 3 major NASCAR events (NEXTEL Cup, the Busch Series and the Craftsman Truck Series) for the year totals around 4300 metric tonnes. This still amounts to only 0.0000017 percent of total emitted CO2.

After a quick search on the Internets, we see that NASCAR estimates its total fuel consumption for a weekend at 6000 gallons. [1] Not much different than my estimation of 4300 gallons. And that another estimate out there puts the total fuel consumption by NASCAR in a year at 2,000,000 gallons. [2] Again, not that different than my estimation of 477,300 gallons. (A factor of 4 is not that big considering the assumptions I made.)

Let’s compare NASCAR to how much CO2 is emitted by “regular” usage of automobiles. In 1988, the residential-typed vehicles travelled 1500 Billion miles. [3] Assuming an average fuel efficeny of 25 miles per gallon, the total amount of gasoline used by the american public (excluding non-residential uses) is 60 billion gallons per year. That is equivalent to 1.2 trillion pounds of CO2 emissions. Converting this, that’s equal to 544 million metric tonnes. NASCAR, as shown above and in the other post, produces around 4300 metric tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s only 0.00079 percent of what the American residential vehicles are putting into the atmosphere.

As I concluded in my other post, this is such a very amount. I think that any efforts, whether for fuel efficiency, CO2 production or anything else, should focus on the automobiles that are driven 13,000 miles per year driven by 300,000,000 people (you and me) and not those driven 13,000 miles per year driven by 43 people (NASCAR drivers).

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