What would be the environmental impact,, in regards to emissions and fuel demand, if NASCAR was shut down?

Question

We making your assessment please keep in mind the spectators who travel to and from the racing events

Answer 1

HUGE.

Not only would all the race cars not be polluting the atmosphere, all the food & beer would not need to be made and transported to the track and all the visitors would not need to travel.

We're talking major CO2 savings here!

Answer 2

Wow.... you people really have no sense of scale.

2% of all greenhouse gasses are CO2. Less than 4% of that 2% is man made. 11% of that is from transportation. Less than half of that is from personal vehicles. And less than half of that is from America.

That means less than 0.00004% of all CO2 is from American vehicles. Nascar related vehicles would be a tiny fraction of that.

You people need to rethink your priorities. Even if CO2 is harmful, there are MUCH better things to be worring about than vehicles.

Answer 3

Don't take this the wrong way... Please but sometimes you guys make me wonder. What are we suppose to do stop living all together and just sit and watch trees grow till we starve to death. People have to relax and work and eat. All of these things cause pollution. To resolve global warming other factors have to come into play. Like a stable economy! (In other words,lets just stop ever thing that moves and see how fast the world ends)

Answer 4

OK I think the impact on total US oil consumption is 0.026%, or a fortieth of one percent, per year.  This is about the same impact on emissions (more or less, from oil burning sources, not total CO2 emissions, which I'm not really talking about).

Here are my calculations - you can argue with any one part, but overall I think these are conservative numbers.  This only takes into account the primary NASCAR circuit, not any of the other circuits (not all of which consume gasoline like the primary circuit does).

41 races on primary circuit.

50,000 people average  x 41 races per year = 2,050,000 people per year.

Divide by 2 = 1,000,000 cars per year driven to a race.

Average drive to race: 100 miles roundtrip.

Miles driven to races per year: 100,000,000

Ave 25 MPG = 100,000,000 / 25 = 4,000,000 gallons.

Divided by 42 gallons per barrel = 95,238 barrels.

Divided by two since you can get more than just gas from a barrel of oil.

= 47,619 barrels of oil per race day.

US oil consumption: 20,802,000 barrels / day.

(41 days / 365 days) * (1 - ((20,802,000 - 47,619) / 20,802,000) * 100) = 0.0257%.

Actual miles driven during average race: 400

Times 25 racers = 10,000 miles.

% impact of actual race (at 10 MPG): 0.00000643%.

Actual answer: 0.026% of total US consumption per year.

So the vast impact is indeed by people driving to the race, not the racers themselves (although I didn't account for practice / qualifying laps etc, I don't think it's that much more).  But maybe the transport of the entire team cross country to attend races might be significant (which I didn't account for).

OK a fortieth of one percent sounds small to some, but it sounds pretty large to me, especially compared to some other estimates given here.  Especially given that this is per year and races only happen on 41 days.

However, this analysis assumes that everyone who attends races would not drive anywhere otherwise.  That's obviously false - some would of course go bass fishing otherwise.  So this number needs to be divided by a sanity factor, let's say 2.  So one eightieth of one percent per year, still a respectable number compared to the effects of other energy consumer groupings.

Answer 5

If NASCAR were shut down it would have a large impact!  The cars would not be polluting the atmosphere, the trucks that transport the racecars would not be polluting also.  Gas would not be wasted on driving in a circle!  And something that you might not think about is that it would not be on, meaning TVs are not using any energy towards NASCAR.

Answer 6

Trivial.  The race cars themselves produce very little emissions on a relative scale.  The spectators whould just find something else to go to.

Answer 7

What a stupid question, that's like if I went into general health and stated that if we made male homosexual relations a felony that carried a death sentence wouldn't it stop the spread of HIV/AIDS?  Nice way to sterotype there bud.

Answer 8

There would be a major important to our environment not only because of emissions and fuel demand. Of course, the fuel consumptions of NASCAR are tremendous and all the pollution their race cars create to our atmosphere are high. Not only these things, but they change their tires often in the races and wrecks sometimes occur. Also, like others said the drinks, food, etc. there produces pollution when they are manufactured as in factories etc.

Answer 9

Do the math. There are 300 million people in the USA. Assuming four members per family. That means 75M families with two cars per family or 150M cars.

If 100,000 people go to a race and worst case scenario is one car per person that is 100,000 cars. 33 race cars and the transporter trucks to get them to the track. That is less than 1/1500 of all the vehicles on the road.

A big impact? I don't think so.

Answer 10

You've got one thing right.  The main effect is due to the spectators.

So, you'd also need to shut down baseball, football, rock concerts, and so on.

We don't need to stop doing things to save the environment.  We just need to do them more efficiently and less wastefully.

Answer 11

minimal.  Maybe 0.0001% less total fuel use in the US on the weekend of a race.

Even with a race drawing 50,000 fans... thats a small percentage of the population of the US driving to go see the race.

The fuel used by the race cars themselves truely is insignificant.

The people who would have gone to the race would in large part drive to some other enetertainment.. so its not really a factor.

The fans who chose other forms of entertainment might go eat at McDonalds or other fast food places... basicly the same trash produced.  Basicly the same environmental impact of producing the packaging.

Overall... the effect would be so small as to be insignificant.  You could save as much energy by getting 5% of the population to change ONE bulb to a CFL in thier house.

Answer 12

None, more ******* would be racing on the streets.

Answer 13

Very little as u think the pollution is CO2 but it is not. CO2 is just the  1 step  of getting to the plants,where they can work on treating our air. It is all plants even to algae.

Answer 14

We would save a lot more if we banned music instead of NASCAR.  Think of all the manufacturing for instruments, compact discs, amplifiers, stages, etc.  Also, compact discs, and I-pods are all from petroleum-derived plastics, and think about the tour buses and the hours that bands put into flying.

The music industry, from the trees cut down to print CD liner notes, to the trees cut to manufacture guitars, to the petroleum pumped to manufacture stereos and i-pods, to the extensive traveling of on-tour musicians (not to mention the travel of the fans to get there and back) is one big, huge drain on our precious resources.

Eliminate the music industry in its entirety, and save the planet!

Answer 15

Sure, you'd stop a bunch of pollution, but then you'd have 300,000 angry rednecks marching on DC.  There would be an increase in incestual births since Bubba won't have anything to take his mind off of sister s*x.  This would then increase the population exponentially and you'd have even more Bubbas running around decreasing the average IQ of the US by 100 points.  Then people would forget that there ever was a NASCAR and the smartest Bubba would say, "Hey y'all lets all git in are ve-hicles and drive around in a left hand circle real fast.  Whoever gits 500 circles first wins this here keg o beer!  YEE-HAAAWWW!!!"

Then we'd have NASCAR all over again and the cycle would repeat.