Energy Slaves: every American has somewhere between 200 and 8,000 energy slaves
Source: https://www.homesthatfit.com/how-precious-is-energy-ask-your-slaves/
Preface. To give you an idea of what energy slaves are, consider what it would take to use human power to provide these:
Human Power Shower – Bang goes the theory – BBC One
And as the article below points out, if you tried to bicycle to power your TV, that free electricity is not free at all. Since food costs money it may even end up being more expensive produced by cycling than from the grid — you’ll end up paying for it all the same, just not in utility bills, but in food.
Slav, I. 2019. Why Powering A City With Bicycles Is Impossible. oiprice.com
Many people have taken a crack at estimating how much muscle power the energy contained within oil represents. Although there are different results, they all show how powerful oil is and how angry our descendants will be that we wasted it driving around in 4,000 pound cars for pleasure as they’re sawing wood and heaving hundred-pound sacks of grain onto horse-drawn wagons.
As I was writing my book “When Trucks Stop Running”, I came up with this (but didn’t include it since there are too many numbers): A class 8 truck can carry 50,000 pounds of goods 500 miles in one day. This would take 1,250 people carrying 40-pound backpacks walking 16 miles a day for 31 days. If the people ate 2,000 kcal of raw food a day, they’d burn 77.5 million kcal (and even more energy if the food is cooked). The truck needs 31 times less energy: at 7 mpg, that’s 71 gallons of diesel containing 35,000 kcal per gallon. Trucks carried over 13.182 billion tons of goods, equal to 329 million people each carrying 40 pound packs.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
