Think long and hard before firing up the grill this Labor Day weekend. According to this recycled Mother Jones story from last year, you are going to be causing harm to the environment.
The smoky, sad truth: America's BBQ grills create as much carbon as a big coal plant https://t.co/lugI41cLxx pic.twitter.com/oBLgS8Ocft
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 4, 2016
But wait; digging into the story paints a different picture than what Mother Jones indicated in its headline.
Roughly eighty percent of American households own barbecues or smokers,according to the Hearth, Patio, and Barbecue Association. Let’s say all 92.5 million of them decide to grill on Saturday. A 2013 study by HPBA found that 61 percent of users opted for gas grills, 42 percent for charcoal, and 10 percent for electric (some respondents had multiple grills). If that reflected all households across the United States, and each household used its grill for an hour on the 4th of July, then we’d get a calculation like this:
(56.425M gas grills*5.6 pounds of CO2) + (38.85M charcoal grills*11 pounds CO2) + (9.25M electric grills*15 pounds CO2 ) = 882 million pounds of CO2
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The key word is "A" coal plant. How many do we have in America???
— John Jackson (@JumpinJezebel) September 4, 2016
https://twitter.com/Duxorcist/status/772490640663773184
It won’t be long. Bernie is already preparing to travel the country warning of how grilling is the number one strategic threat to the United States.
Related:
NYT’s latest lame attempt to make a case for global warming is flooded with reality
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