How Bad IS the Drive-Through?

Hey Mr. Green,
What is the global-warming impact of the omnipresent drive-through? Surely this has to be one of our biggest wastes of energy. --Robert in Biglerville, Pennsylvania

In drive-throughs or anyplace, idling is, to summon the old saying, the devil's workshop. Every hour you idle, you waste up to 0.7 gallons of gas (depending on your engine type) going nowhere. So it pays to turn your engine off if you're going to be still for more than 30 seconds.

In a given year, U.S. cars burn some 1.4 billion gallons of fuel just idling. Not to mention idling trucks, which waste another 1.5 billion gallons. Collectively, we emit about 58 million tons of carbon dioxide while we're essentially doing nothing.

Taking the fast-food industry as an example, and taking into account that the average McDonald's drive-through wait is 159 seconds, we can calculate that the company's consumers burn some 7.25 million gallons of gas each year. The figure for the entire U.S. fast-food industry? Roughly 50 million gallons.

Though Wendy's boasts that it zips you through in a mere 131 seconds, that's about the amount of time it would take to slap together your own sandwich, or dump some leftovers in Tupperware, and bypass the lines (and perhaps a bypass) entirely.

The spread of American idle may be an exciting prospect for companies seeking to expand this lazy food-getting method to the rest of the world--but it's a devastating one for the environment. Consider that McDonald's plans to open 25 drive-throughs in China, following KFC's lead. KFC installed its first drive-through there in 2002 and is working on 100 more. If China and India, which is also jumping aboard the drive-through bandwagon, get up to speed, they can idle away a truly staggering figure: 30 billion gallons of gas. Every year.

Advice About Procreation

Hey Mr. Green,
Is the Sierra Club willing to acknowledge that population growth overwhelms all efforts to be greener? We can drive less, ride bicycles, and improve insulation until the cows come home, but it ain't gonna be enough. I've yet to find a single person who is willing to forgo having children to bring sanity to our planet. Are you? --Jeff in Denver, Colorado

I've already done my demographic damage. Mea culpa. But I pledge to refrain from future propagation. Even if Britney Spears offers her undying love, meds, and millions for my green genes, I'll "just say no" in the grand tradition of Nancy Reagan.

The Sierra Club has long recognized the problems associated with high fertility rates and been a strong advocate for family planning. Through our Global Population and the Environment Program (sierraclub.org/population), we promote a variety of ways to produce fewer people, such as providing women with better, more affordable access to healthcare (and therefore birth control), improving education, and reducing poverty. The countries that have made the greatest progress in these realms, such as Japan and most of Europe, now have the lowest fertility rates, with fewer than two children per female. Desperately poor nations like Niger, with 5.3 kids per female, continue to produce the most offspring.

While limiting fertility rates is indeed important, if we don't curb runaway consumption, we'll still be in deep trouble. For example, the United States consumes three times as much wood as does the rest of the world (seven times as much as people-packed China), and though we have only 4.5 percent of the world's population, we burn 20 percent of its fossil fuels. Obviously, if we maintain such rates, and if the rest of the world is stupid enough to imitate our profligate ways, humanity will end up burning exponentially more fuel than it already does. So I'll keep harping about lightbulbs and insulation and family planning, education, and ending poverty.