How Green Is Your Favorite Superhero?

To draw attention to the average citizen's carbon footprint, a team of researchers calculated the eco-rating of a number of superheroes. Learn how they rank in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey there,
brain stuff, Lauren 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

(00:22):
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.

(00:45):
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 thousand pounds. That's abouts of
carbon per year. An average person in the United Arab

(01:06):
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

(01:27):
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 hacker might weigh in at a conservative estimate
of one and fifty one thousand pounds or sixty eight kilograms,

(01:50):
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. An 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

(02:12):
require an insane number of calories to accomplish this feat,
possibly as much as eighty nine million pounds or forty
five million kims worth of carbon. But isn't this kind
of a silly question for serious scientists to spend their
time exploring? Poster co author Miles Treyer, a post doctorial
researcher at Stanford, told EOS, if I calculate my own

(02:34):
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

(03:00):
Usling Shields and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on
this and lots of other environmental topics, visit our home planet,
how stuff Works dot com.