If you’re like me, there are few things you can do that are as exhilarating as racing your Porsche around the track. Concerns, pressures, annoyances and petty preoccupations melt away as quickly as the rubber on your Hoosiers and the savings in your bank account. And yet, it is so worth it.
Unfortunately, there is little denying the adverse impact that our cherished sport has on the environment. Every gallon of gasoline you burn creates about 8,900 grams of CO2, which is equivalent to about 20 pounds. (If you’re interested in how burning a gallon of gasoline, which weighs about 6.3 pounds, can produce 20 pounds of CO2, contact a chemist or check out https://www.fueleconomy.gov.feg/contentincludes/co2_inc.htm. The answer has to do with the carbon content of gasoline and the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen…
I’ve never calculated my MPG while racing; all I know is that I must be making someone rich when I’m fueling up at LRP. And because I’m afraid of running out of gas on the track , I know that I use about 1/3 of a tank per 25-minute session. That is around ~6 gallons, or more than one gallon every five minutes. Given that a gallon lasts almost 30 minutes on the highway, the gas consumption of racing is egregious. Putting all of these numbers together suggest the following for one (modern 911):
Let’s say there are 60 cars attending an average track day. That is 49,380 pounds of CO2 we will be belching into the air. For reference, this is roughly the equivalent to the weight of a big garbage truck. For some, it might be more intuitive to think of gas in volume terms. As one gallon of gas produces 172ft3 of CO2, our track day will produce enough to fill approximately twenty Washington Monuments.
So what can we do?
We can purchase carbon offsets. A carbon offset is a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases made in order to compensate for emissions made elsewhere (like our day at the track). There are two types of markets for carbon offsets; compliance and voluntary. For our track events, it is purely voluntary and up to you. The voluntary carbon market is facilitated by certification programs who provide standards, guidance, and establish requirements for project developers to follow in order to generate carbon offset credits. A common project type is renewable energy such as wind farms, biomass energy, biogas digesters, or hydroelectric dams. Others include energy efficiency projects like efficient cookstoves, the destruction of industrial pollutants or agricultural byproducts, destruction of landfill methane, and forestry projects (think planting trees).
I’ve researched a bunch of organizations who facilitate carbon offset purchases and the following has earned high marks for the rigor and effectiveness of its approach.
They allow people to offset their carbon emissions by purchasing offset credits that help fund projects like low smoke stoves in Darfur, a hydroelectric dam in Honduras, and reforestation efforts in Nicaragua, to name a few. The efficiency with which each of these projects offset a ton of carbon varies a bit, but prices tend to be in the $20/ton range.
If we conservatively estimate that each of us will emit about half a ton of CO2 at a track event, we’re talking about ~$10 extra to offset that, by donating to one of these projects. It actually seems amazingly cheap to offset CO2, so I’d like to think we can spare a bit more, especially when putting it in the context of the cost of a track day.
If you’re interested, go to https://marketplace.goldstandard.org/collections/projects, and it will take you to the list of carbon offsets where you can make a donation directly.
As we’re all enjoying the sonorously violent whines, barks and trembles of our internal combustion engines, give some thought to what’s animating those soul stirring sounds. But do your thinking in the pits—we don’t want anyone forgetting to center their steering on the uphill.
