“Good for the Environment”, Eh?
Looks like our Hollywood “do-gooder” environmentalist extraordinaire Leonardo DiCaprio is at it again. This time, he’s taking substantial time off from his acting career to do “good for the environment”.
In an interview with Germany’s mass circulation daily Bild, the 38-year-old American actor said: “I am a bit drained. I’m now going to take a long, long break. I’ve done three films in two years and I’m just worn out.”
“I would like to improve the world a bit. I will fly around the world doing good for the environment.”
OK, let’s take him at his word. And let’s look at what the effect of this trip will be on Mother Earth.
Now, you know a Hollywood “A-list” type like DiCaprio isn’t going to fly anywhere on regularly scheduled airlines. He’ll fly on a private or chartered jet.
Let’s be kind and assume he uses a small LearJet – say, a small one like the Bombardier 35A. That aircraft can cruise comfortably at around 400 knots, or 460 MPH, for a bit over 2000 miles – in round numbers, about of 4.5 hours flight time.
That aircraft uses 197 gallons of jet fuel per hour at cruise. So each 2000 miles will use about 885 gallons of jet fuel.
Now, assume 30,000 miles for the total length of DiCaprio’s round the world “save the planet” tour. (He’ll certainly be visiting “down under”, NZ, and probably South Africa and South America, plus North America, Europe, and parts of Asia – so that’s probably an underestimate.) Doing the math, that comes to around 13,300 gallons of jet fuel.
Chemically, jet fuel is kerosene-based. Kerosene has an average chemical composition of C12H26. That means it’s approximately 85% carbon by weight.
Jet fuel weighs about 6.8 pounds per gallon. So DiCaprio is going to burn about 90,400 pounds – or about 45 tons – of jet fuel on his trip.
That amount of jet fuel will contain about 38.3 tons of carbon. But remember: according to the “save the world” crowd – “Carbon . . . . baaaaad!”
Why is carbon “bad”? Well, according to the “save the world” crowd it’s because it produces carbon dioxide.
Virtually every atom of carbon in that jet fuel will produce a molecule of CO2 when burned. (The tiny fraction that doesn’t will produce stuff that’s even worse as a pollutant – unburned hydrocarbons, soot, etc . . . .) Since the carbon is only about 27% of the weight of each molecule of CO2, burning this amount of jet fuel will add more than 140 tons of carbon dioxide to the earth’s atmosphere.
That’s just the jet travel. It doesn’t account for the fuel for DiCaprio’s chauffer-driven limo at each stop. (What, do you expect him to rent a Volkswagon and drive himself anywhere?) Or the fuel for the vehicles for his bodyguards or his entourage. Or the energy used to heat/cool their hotel rooms. Or . . .well, you get the picture.
Also, a “round the world” trip like this shouldn’t take more than 3 months. All of the above fuel and energy? That’s only what DiCaprio’s going to waste – unnecessarily – in about 3 months. Wonder what he’ll burn through during the rest of the year?
Here’s a real world sanity check: a guy or gal driving a car that gets 20 miles to the gallon 15,000 miles annually burns 750 gallons of fuel. That’s only about 5.6% of the more than 13,400 gallons of fuel DiCaprio will waste in 90 days during his meaningless publicity stunt.
Hypocrisy, thy name is “Hollywood”. Or here, maybe that should be “DiCaprio”.
Look, I’m all for conserving resources for the next generation. I don’t want to see the environment spoiled. I want my kids and grandkids to have a nice place to live. They won’t if we screw up the planet.
But what DiCaprio’s doing here isn’t “saving the planet” – it’s nothing more than meaningless grandstanding to feed his ego. Like so many other libidiot ideas and causes, it sounds good initially and makes people “feel good”. But when you analyze it, just like many libidiot ideas and causes it’s actually wasteful and counterproductive.
Want to really help “save the earth”, Lenny my boy? Then freaking stay home vice traveling the globe – and promote conservation from and within Hollywood.
You make films for a living. You should be able to figure out how to reach people from a distance.
(Author’s note: the original version of this article used diesel fuel as a basis for calculation of the amount of CO2 generated by DiCaprio’s upcoming “save the world” tour. That was an error. The reference originally consulted erroneously implied modern jet fuel is chemically similar to diesel fuel. That is not the case; like most older jet fuels, modern Jet A and Jet A1 are kerosene-based. The error has been corrected above.)
Category: Dumbass Bullshit
Saving the planet sure fucks it up, doesn’t it?
Just ask Al Gore. Then again, he’s so stressed from saving the planet and selling snake oil (errrrr…”carbon tax credits”) he had to fork over $9 million for an estate in Montecito.
ON THE FRIGGIN BEACH.
Very well done, Hondo! I like it when someone besides mysel points these kinds of things out to those “feel good” idiots crowd. If DiCaprio was real serious about the environment as he thinks he might be, he’d be pulling the chain to get more refineries built in the USA and use our own resources here rather than importing from third world countries that “hate” us. Oh hey, that would put more people to work too, wouldn’t it? You need to use correct the pound per gallon of jet fuel for your calculations to be correct. Jet A & A1 weigh 6.8 lbs per gal. verses #2 diesel 7.15 pound per gal.
Leonardo who?
da Caprio. From Capri.
Thanks, streetsweeper. Error corrected above.
That’s what I get for fact-checking my memory that jet fuel was kerosene based and consulting a misleading source. (smile)
@4. Like the pants?
I’ve just started having these sorts research how Solar Panels are made, then tell them to look up pictures of Chinese strip mines to put two and two together. Or I ask them what they plan to do about the water problems seeing as how those actually have some scientific basis to work with.
This isn’t about doing good, it’s about feeling good. They want someone to pat them on the back and proclaim something inane like, “Atta boy!”. Useless twit.
If we really want to pick a nit, do little jets use Jet A or Jet B these days?
Bwess his widdle heart, Mr short pants.
OWB: pretty sure they use Jet A in the US and Jet A1 overseas. Best I can tell, Jet B is generally only used in very cold climates.
I used weight for Jet A in the revised article. Jet A1 is slightly lighter and thus has slightly lower energy density; you’d have to burn a bit more fuel by volume if using Jet A1 because of that fact.
I kinda doubt Lenny-boy is going to visit Moscow in February. (smile)
Capri pants. Yeah, I forgot about that reference.
I was actually referring to the island of Capri in the Med.
These Hollywood people seem to mean well, but they always seem to do these things when someone starts asking ‘whatever happened to so-and-so’.
“I’ve done three movies in two years”
And I’ve seen exactly ZERO of them. But let’s do the math, shall we?
Let’s assume then, that the average Hollywood production goes 60-90 days. I’ll split the difference and go 75 days per. Times three movies, we get 225 days. Now again, I’ll be generous and assume an average of 12 hours a day during production (not always the case, but whatever.) So now we’re up to about 2700 hours working in the past two years.
IOW, about the same number of hours I put in at work last year, minus commute.
Boy, that’s some rough shit there.
A LR-35 seems a little small. I’d expect he’d be in something bigger like a G-550 or a Global Express.
minus commute = not including commute.
Sparky no function beer well without. And that Oatmeal Stout yesterday was some goooooood stuff.
Kinda like Sean Penn claiming to promote human rights when he supported Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez, huh?
@12: most likely you are correct. I intentionally used the small Lear in the article to give Lenny-boy the benefit of the doubt. In reality, he’d almost certainly use a bigger plane and thus more fuel. The environmental impact would thus be significantly worse than I’ve calculated.
He feels he needs to drum up more Libtard hypocrisy street cred in order to win obvious political awards disguised as something about acting is all. That dude is an absolute clown but a decent actor.
I’ll never forget the promotional tour for Inception where him and his child like co-star Ellen Page just went around insulting possible viewers as though it was nothing because what they were doing was noble.
@11 Yeah, but he had to, like, memorize lines and stuff. Not like a regular job where you already know things. It’s really hard work. Nome sayin?
Anytime anybody gets up and announces to the whole world they are going somewhere to “do good”… the only good they end up doing is for themselves.
Let’s get all these Hollywood idiots on the4 same plane to…errr…save fuel then send them around the world starting in the middle east, Syria would be a good place to start!
Yeah, and if he screws up he has to do another take.
We screw up and shit (or people) glows or gets crispy fried.
I though it was funny that Obama failed to mention Hollywood during his gun violence speech. After all, who benefits most under the bush era tax plans while at the same trashing others and supporting Obama with donations and fundraisers?
Quite the double standard, just like the environment.
It gets old.
as usual Hondo misrepresents numbers and blatantly lies to promote his right wing idealogy and the rest of you eat it up like a bunch of sheep..
@20 You never miss a chance to pat yourself on the back do you sparky?
No, dipshit, I draw a DISTINCTION between people who talk in front of a camera and emote, versus people who actually, you know, WORK FOR A FUCKING PAYCHECK.
Surely even you can understand that difference, can’t you?
Pray tell, OG, what happens if you have a bad day at work?
Trucker not get a happy ending?
OG, your thoughtful analyis of Hondo’s writing is truly a marvel. Perhaps next time you could include data points that refute his, just an idea.
Sparky, pay no attention to OG the babbling idiot.
She’s probably having cramps.
The lack of logic is astounding. Not OG’s, she or he has none.
Why can’t diCaprio take a boat, or take the bus around Hollywood preaching environmental stewardship? Or does Ed Begley Jr have a monopoly?
DaveO–at least I give Begley some credit. While he’s a whacko, he at least walks the walk and doesn’t preach from 35,000 feet.
This doesn’t surprise me, after all actors spend their careers mouthing someone else’s words. Thus when they need to use their own words they often find themselves at a loss for an intelligent exchange to express their thoughts. DiCaprio makes some interesting movies, but like many artists their world view has no basis in reality. Another reason to avoid making celebrity worship part of any culture, the good looking, vacuous actors generate nothing of value beyond a few hours of amusement. For this they are paid extremely well, we should remember that is enough, they are not gods nor are many of them particularly interesting when they are not prancing about in front of a camera or on stage.
Forgive OG. She is nervous. She is scheduled to ride an orca in the Atlantic later today wearing a seal costume. It’s one of the requirements of her Ph.D program.
Ex-PH2, 2/17 Air Cav – I thought it might be because she was worried she may have miscounted days prior to meeting “Knees2TheBreeze” (DeWald?) at the NoTell Motel last week. (smile)
ObamaGirl: care to point out the “lies” in my article? As a self-professed “PHd” student, surely you must know enough basic chem and math to be able to do that.
If there are any lies or significant errors, that is.
I’m guessing we’ll hear crickets from you on that count, though. Because while it’s easy to claim that someone is “lying” – like you did in comment 22 above – proving it is a different story. Especially when they’re not lying, and the math and science involved is both simple and sound.
Anyone else out there want to check my references and do the math independently, feel free to do so.
Let’s say, purely for the purpose of debate, that your math is completely in error, Hondo. So what? It wouldn’t change the point of your post if the figures are half your estimate, three times your estimate, or something else entirely.
But thanks for making an effort to come up with intelligible numbers.
(Does this count as peer review?)
Dang,VOV, you said it for me. Actors act. While some actors write and direct, most do not. While I respect some of them for the real work, I have never seen any of them as deep thinkers. Why even one drop of ink is wasted on their views is beyond me. I will listen to their comments on their work, for the most part they are totally vapid in most aspects of the real world. They exist in the realm of fantasy. Celebrity should not endow them with any credibility whatsoever. Point of fact, Kim Kardashian, famous for being famous. The Prosecution rests.
@33 Actually no, but Hondo is usually so careful with his numerical calculations I can find no errors and I do check because I like to show that I am pretty sharp around a slide rule when it comes to numbers as well…..in this particular set of calculations I consider he is being fairly conservative in offering DiCaprio the little plane….there’s not a chance in h3ll that little twerp will ride the small plane….thus the impact, as he suggests in an earlier response, will be more damaging to the environment than predicted in the body of the article.
@34 plus that whole “housewives” franchise and the little chubby girl from the beauty pageants…what the h3ll is the attraction?
EVerything you need to know about Jet-A fuel is herein conveyed: AVIATION TURBINE FUEL (JET FUEL) CIVIL JET FUELS Aviation turbine fuels are used for powering jet and turbo-prop engined aircraft and are not to be confused with Avgas. Outside former communist areas, there are currently two main grades of turbine fuel in use in civil commercial aviation : Jet A-1 and Jet A, both are kerosene type fuels. There is another grade of jet fuel, Jet B which is a wide cut kerosene (a blend of gasoline and kerosene) but it is rarely used except in very cold climates. JET A-1 Jet A-1 is a kerosene grade of fuel suitable for most turbine engined aircraft. It is produced to a stringent internationally agreed standard, has a flash point above 38°C (100°F) and a freeze point maximum of -47°C. It is widely available outside the U.S.A. Jet A-1 meets the requirements of British specification DEF STAN 91-91 (Jet A-1), (formerly DERD 2494 (AVTUR)), ASTM specification D1655 (Jet A-1) and IATA Guidance Material (Kerosine Type), NATO Code F-35. JET A Jet A is a similar kerosene type of fuel, produced to an ASTM specification and normally only available in the U.S.A. It has the same flash point as Jet A-1 but a higher freeze point maximum (-40°C). It is supplied against the ASTM D1655 (Jet A) specification. JET B Jet B is a distillate covering the naphtha and kerosene fractions. It can be used as an alternative to Jet A-1 but because it is more difficult to handle (higher flammability), there is only significant demand in very cold climates where its better cold weather performance is important. In Canada it is supplied against the Canadian Specification CAN/CGSB 3.23 MILITARY JP-4 JP-4 is the military equivalent of Jet B with the addition of corrosion inhibitor and anti-icing additives; it meets the requirements of the U.S. Military Specification MIL-DTL-5624U Grade JP-4. (As of Jan 5, 2004, JP-4 and 5 meet the same US Military Specification). JP-4 also meets the requirements of the British Specification DEF STAN 91-88 AVTAG/FSII (formerly DERD 2454),where FSII stands… Read more »
Slide rule? Geez, VOV – you need to join the 20th century and get a calculator! (smile)
Hondo, when there are no batteries a slide rule is great. If we could put Armstrong on the moon with a slide rule and a computer that could basically receive flight data only, it’s good enough for me to do a few things with….
But I have to admit these new scientific calculators apps downloaded on your smart phone are outrageously cool….
VOV: they make scientific calculators today that are dual powered (battery plus solar cell) for about $10. So the “doesn’t need batteries” argument doesn’t fly.
No excuse for living in the past, amigo. (smile)
Hey VOV! I’m with you, amigo!! No reason at all to not have both on hand. On rainy days, you and I may be the only ones able to calculate stuff? Scary thought.
A pencil and a piece of paper….
Ex-PH2: in theory, paper and pencil works. In practice, not so much – particularly when you start using trig functions, square/cube/nth roots, natural log/exponentiation, and the like. Quick: how do you determine the 4th root of (3 times a given power level ) / (4 times pi times the Holtzmann constant times a constant radius cubed) using a pencil and paper? (That’s the calculation needed to figure out the effective [AKA black body] temperature of a spherical object radiating a constant level of power.)
Yes, one can indeed do that to a reasonable degree of accuracy with pencil and paper and a math handbook containing tables of logarithms. But unless they’re a masochist, why on earth would anyone want to do that calculation by hand? (smile)
OWB: any solar-cell powered calculator I’ve seen would typically work, even with dead batteries, if there was enough light to read the display. And if there’s not enough light to read an LCD calculator display, you generally won’t be able to see the paper clearly enough to calculate by hand either. (smile)
Obama’s baby mama causing drama again…I wonder if she can calculate the specific gravity of an unknown gas. Using her PHd of course.
Oh yea! Much better Hondo. Kudos, amigo. Now to see if Obama baby mama drags her fat ass back into the discussion.
@42-Hondo, that’s degress Kelvin or color temperature. Give me a break. I was a Photographer’s Mate. It was on the tests.
Until things went all digi on us, gamma charts and color temperature were esssential pieces of knowledge for any PH worth his/her salt.
Quick: what’s the difference between daylight and tungsten film? What is the correct name for silver in a film emulsion? What causes photographic film to refister an image?
Even quicker: What do CCD and CMOS mean?
OK. The last two were easy, as they’re both general categories of semiconductor devices and/or fabrication techniques:
CCD – charge coupled device
CMOS – complimentary metal oxide substrate
The former technology is used in many types of sensors. The latter is used in a wide variety of electronic components and devices.
Daylight film: working from memory, this was typically used in natural light (daylight) or with blue-corrected flash bulbs; tungsten film was generally used with floodlights, if I recall correctly. I’m only an occasional photographer and transitioned to digital photography years ago, so that could well be wrong or only a partial answer.
Can’t really discuss the chemical changes that occur in film on exposure and/or during development, other than to say that in general that’s what causes old-style chemical film to register an image – e.g., chemical changes in the emulsion due to the incoming photons which strike it during exposure. Don’t believe I ever knew the precise details, so I’d have to look them up.
My point in providing the example was to show that technology advances and provides new and more useful tools regularly. At some point, many of even the best old tools – no matter how useful they were at one time – become obsolete and become little more than curiosities. Sort of like having a blacksmith forge you a pound of nails vice buying them from Lowe’s or Home Depot – interesting, but probably no longer terribly practical.
IMO slide rules have reached that point – and yes, I’ve used one myself in the past. Also IMO, film cameras are fast approaching the same.
YMMV.
OK, you get the pass on CCD and CMOS (except you misspelled complementary — naughty, naughty). But the remaining answers are:
To produce an accurate color rendition of an object photographed in daylight or artificial light, the film used must have an emulsion with the correct color temperature sensitivity.
Daylight film is color-sensitive to radiated light at a color temperature equal to 5500 degrees Kelving or 5500K, the same color temperature of our sun, or yellow.
Tungsten film is color-sensitive to radiated light at a color temerature equal to between 3200K and 3400K, or blue/green. (Blue is negative film, green is positive film)
Kodachrome film, which is no longer made, was sensitive to a color temperature of 3200.
The correct name for silver in a film emulsion is silver halide. When a photon strikes an undeveloped silver halide grain, it causes the silver to release an electron thereby causing the grain to ‘lock’ or clump. Silver halide grains become visible as images when processed with photographic chemistry. The larger the grains, the lower the film speed. Eastman Kodak produced film in ASA/ISO speeds from 12 to 4400. Kodak Recording Film 2475 was an extremely high speed and extremely grainy film developed during the Cold War for surveillance in extremely low light. It could be pushed to ASA speeds of 24,000 by increasing development time and reducing agitation.
And, in regard to Planck’s black body formula, I will only add that T = 1600, and Planck’s formula was the genesis of quantum mechanics.
Besides, what could possibly be more fun that solving equations on a blackboard or a roll of butcher’s paper?
Oh, crap. ‘The larger the grains, the lower the film speed’ should read ‘The larger the grains, the HIGHER the film speed’. Too much of a hurry.
Ex-PH2: we’re saying the same thing about tungsten film in different ways, and are in violent agreement.
I’m pretty sure tungsten film was optimized for that particular temperature because it was optimized for use with the old tungsten-element photofloods commonly used by photographers years ago. I believe that is how it came by its name of “tungsten film”.
From what I’ve read, the tungsten filaments in those photofloods actually were at temperatures above 3000K (depending on the type) during operation. (That’s getting close to tungsten’s melting point, and is probably why they had such short rated lifespans; a normal light bulb’s tungsten filament isn’t pushed that hard, and is “only” at temperature of around 2800K.) In contrast, the sun’s surface is generally thought to be somewhere around 5780K – hence the higher “color temperature” of “daylight”. Daylight has a color temperature of 5500K because it is emitted by something that actually is roughly that hot – the sun’s surface.
It all links back to physics. (smile)
Still waiting, ObamaGirl. C’mon – demonstrate your “PHd” scientific prowess!