If everyone had a carbon footprint of zero, how many people could the united states sustain?

Question

If everyone had a carbon footprint of zero, how many people could the united states sustain?

Answer 1

NONE!

If you breath you have a "carbon footprint".  To have a "carbon footprint" of zero you would have to be dead.

If we stopped all carbon dioxide production, the trees and grasses (along with all grain crops) would die too.  Also the ocean's phytoplankton would die which would cause all sea life to perish. (see why plankton link)

I studied the "carbon cycle" in high school science class in the late 60's.  If that cycle is broken, everything dies. (see 306carbon link)

I'm still one the MANY CO2-agnostics.  The "greenhouse" effect of water vapor is up to 9 times that of CO2 but as the IPCC put it:

"Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) IPCC Third Assessment Report chapter lead author Michael Mann is quoted as saying, 'It is extremely misleading, however, when scientists cite the role of water vapor as a greenhouse gas,' because it can not be controlled by humans." (see Wikipedia link)

Now, let's see... water vapor has so much more effect but is not considered a "greenhouse" gas because man can't control it?  Well that's just a lie according to the "greenhouse" n***s.  They say the earth will become more arid if CO2 level increases... so we can decrease water vapor levels by increasing CO2 levels?  Then because the water effect is so much greater than CO2, the eath's temperature will actually drop as CO2 levels increase?

Wake-up and smell the manure!

Answer 2

1,0000,0000,0000,0000,000,+1 more.

Answer 3

You can't get from A to B.

The number of people that could live a sustainable lifestyle within the geographical borders of the US depends entirely on what mix of lifestyles are adopted and not on the carbon footprint of those lifestyles.

For example, an extended family could feed and clothe themselves and meet all their basic needs on a 2 hectare smallholding. Assuming a ballpark figure of 200 million hectares of suitable land*, that means the country could support 100 million families, or half a billion or so people.

However, if they also wanted to use the land for other things - power generation, hospitals, recreation, shopping malls, factories, highways - and have machines do all the farming for them (with all the infrastructure that entails) and still waste millions of hectares on military training areas, golf courses for lawyers and doctors, or Hummer parking spaces, the figure is probably going to be far fewer.

* the usa has just under 10 million square kilometers of land and there are 100 hectares in a square kilometer, but not all the land is suitable for that level of intensive farming, so a larger area of poorer land would be needed for the same number of people.