OK - here is the deal...we need to reduce our oil consumption in the United States and it is up to every red blooded American to do their part.
While observing my wife blow drying her hair the other morning ...I thought....just how much oil would we save in America if every American was bald and didn't use a blow dryer.
Using my own bald yet green head as an example...a simple wash rag over the head and my head is dry before I get out of the shower. How many trees does that save? None ...but it does save electricity and it is not that hard to convert that to Barrels of Oil consumption.
Follow me here with some assumptions:
The average blow dryer uses 1500 Watts per hour of electricity.
The average person with hair uses their blow dryer for 15 minutes daily. Sometimes twice if they take an extra shower.
Here is the math: 20 minutes of blow drying uses .5 KW of electricity. In a year = 182.5 KW hours.
Factor in an extra 10 gallons of hot water ( 4 extra minutes at 2.5 gallons per minute ) to shampoo and condition your hair and then rinse it out. The energy cost for an energy efficient hot water heater is about 700 KW hours...wow! More then the blow dryer by far!
You get .027322 gals of gas out of 1 KW hour....times 882.5 KW hours in a year that equals close to 24 gals of gas a year to shampoo and blow dry your hair.
There are 300 million people in the US today...if half are men ...150 million and 20 % of them are bald or nearly bald anyway...that leaves 270 million people using a blow dryer each day. Twenty four gallons of gas times 270 million people = 6.5 billion gallons of gasoline a year to fuel an extra 10 gallons of hot water and 20 minutes of a 1500 watt blow dryer per day.
You could further the "Greenness" of going bald by factoring the amount of gasoline America would save by eliminating the use of Shampoos and Conditioners as they both have petroleum products in their ingredients as well as all the gasoline we would save by not driving across town to your favorite barbershop or hair stylist. But the fact is ... if we were all bald ...we would probably buy more petroleum based skin care products to use on our scalps and drive across town to "head buffing parlors" so we would have shiny healthy looking bald heads. They offset.
The US uses about 420 Billion gallons of gasoline a year so this amounts to of 1.5 percent of our U S Gasoline usage we would save by outlawing hair and hair care! Using some simple math at $3.00 gallon gasoline this translates into $19,500,000,000 of energy savings!
Maybe my math is a little fuzzy and my assumptions not perfectly scientific...but you get the idea!
I was discussing this with my 82 year old Marine Corp veteran dad and he said when he was growing up some 70 years ago...his Dad would cut everyones hair using a bowl and a pair of scissors. It hurt a little as the scissors weren't that sharp...but...there wasn't an Ozone problem, there was no shortage or gasoline and we weren't slaves to OPEC or any other country for oil.
How much more proof does a person need?
GO GREEN - GO BALD!
It is your patriotic duty!
Recent Comments