Robot’s Useless Reviews – CO₂

One carbon atoms, two oxygens. A simple recipe. The sort that life seems to whip up a little too often, like mom’s meatloaf, heavy, warm and dry.

In fact, we’re slowly dying of meatloaf, if you believe in science. We’re making too much of it. All of Earth’s atmosphere is like one large chafing dish, overbrimming with unwanted meatloaf. A whole industry has sprung up to develop meatloaf-sequestration technologies.

We can all agree that meatloaf is terrible, but what to do about it?

Well, as long as we’re butchering science and employing insane metaphors, let me make a few suggestions. There are some things meatloaf is actually good for, like inflating bike tires. Nearly every ride I go on, I keep two small meatloaf canisters in my saddle bag. For such small containers, they sure do pack a lot of meatloaf. It’s compressed I’m told.

Sounds pretty gross.

Ah, but when I’ve got a flat tire, what a joy it is to deploy the compressed meatloaf to reinflate. Then the meatloaf is inside my tire. We are literally riding around on meatloaf sequestration devices!

Speaking of garbage science, if you web search “How Many Bicycles Are in the World?” the consensus answer is about 1 billion. It’s a beautifully round number, which makes me skeptical, but the next step in this process is nearly faultless, I think. If there are 1 billion bicycles, then there are 2 billion bike tires. The equation for this is B*2=2B. It’s complicated math, but check it on a calculator.

I’m wicked good at this stuff, as we say here in Eastern Massachusetts. Now shit’s gonna get real. Buckle up.

The volume of a torus, which is the fancy word for donut, the same delicious shape as a bike tire, is represented thusly: V=(πr²)(2πR), where R is the major radius and r is the minor radius. Don’t worry too much about the finer details. I’ve already demonstrated my prowess with advanced mathematics. Like the loan sharks say, “Trust me!” Like the magician says, “Look over there!” Like James Acaster says, “Death comes to us all.”

So the answer is about 5000 cubic centimeters, assuming an average wheel size of 27.5″, and an average tire size of 30mm. We’re spit balling here. We’re ballparking. We’re causing deceased experts across an array of fields to spin (like so many bicycle wheels) in their graves. What is it that legions of absolute wingnuts say? Do your own research?

Yeah. Go ahead.

Anyhoo, I make that 10¹³ cubic centimeters, worldwide, give or take. That’s 3.5 million cubic tons of carbon dioxide, er…meatloaf, removed from the atmosphere. As I’ve written previously, the bicycle can solve all our problems. If it can do something with all of the Earth’s excess meatloaf, what can’t it do?

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