Last week, 46,000 revelers finally broke camp and split the scene of this year’s Burning Man festival, The Green Man. You could call it the "biggest party in the world," though it defies categorization and convention: part art, music, rave, pyrotechnics show, and costume orgy, it’s probably the only place in America you’d see a 1,000-foot-tall mushroom cloud intended for politically-minded artistic expression.

Yep, that’s right - a 1,000 ft. mushroom cloud, and no, that doesn’t mean above-ground nuclear testing has resumed in the Nevada desert. It just means that the artist who built Crude Awakenings - a 100 ft. tall oil derrick - wanted to blow it up at the end of the festival (to "dramatize the worshipful relationship and dependence modern man has toward oil"), and to do so he used 900 gallons of jet fuel (apparently off-spec fuel given to him by NASA) and 2,000 gallons of liquid propane, not to mention the timber and steel used in the structure. You can see it on YouTube here.

So how does such a staggering display of firepower — the largest explosion in the events history — contribute to an event thematically-focused on reneewable energy and green tech? Well, lets just say it’s "green in theme"…

"If you were really green, you would have walked."
- Posted sign at the entrance to Burning Man

Burning Man was founded on a novel concept: take a population the size of a small town, institute a gift economy (no vending or sales allowed) but maintain basic legal structure (state and federal laws still apply, mostly), and then demolish all regularly-maintained social conventions. Want to dress up like a samurai? Great. Don’t feel like wearing any clothes at all? No problem. Don’t want to sleep ever again? That’s a given. It’s like the Matrix meets Never-Never-Land.

So just how Green was this Man, anyway?

Now don’t get me wrong — I dig the theme. In fact, it’s part of the reason I went this year, and I drove to the festival without burning a drop of petroleum. But a remotely-located, 46,000-person party based on the primal need for really loud electronic music and torching large wooden effigies doesn’t strike me as particularly low-impact.

Consider the amount of road and air travel required by those attending the event (the kids next to me spent $300 in fuel to get there, and only stayed 2 nights). People attend from every corner of the globe, which involves considerable international travel, and thousands of road trips that otherwise may not have happened. Add to this the absolutely massive scale of pyrotechnic displays, and the total CO2 bill for the 8-days of Burning Man comes out to about 27,000 tons of CO2 each year (2006 data).

Seems like a lot, except when compared to the 23,013,698 metric tons of CO2 the US emits anyway in those same 8 days. (2005 data - EIA). In case you were wondering, Burning Man represents an increase of 1/10th of a percent over business as usual. And since many travelers are taking regularly scheduled work vacations to attend the event, it would be hard to claim this is a unique increase.

Even so, the festival has made some effort to reduce its impact. In 2005, the "Cooling Man" project was founded to offer carbon offsets for festival-goers. The project’s web site estimates that if 70% of burners (32,200 people) offset 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions, Black Rock City would become the first carbon negative city in the world. Of course, that depends on how you feel about carbon offsets, and who actually participates. Since offsetting 1 ton only costs $10, it’s unclear why they don’t just tack this onto the ticket price (tickets cost around $250 anyway). So far this year, the Cooling Man project has offset 627 tons of CO2.

As you may have heard, the big deal this year was the Green Pavilion underneath the man, with 30,000 square feet of decidedly science-fair-like green-tech exhibits, including solar and wind power, alternative fuels (a Greasecar SVO conversion), and one electric car plastered white with playa dust. At least 50% of the power for the displays came from a 30 kW solar array that was given to Gerlach, NV, after the event (which will generate $3 million of electricity over the next 20 years, at no cost to Gerlach/Lovelock residents). Two other solar projects were also designed and sponsored by Burning Man, including a 120 kW solar array in Gerlach, Nevada and a 60 kW solar array in Lovelock, Nevada. Burning Man also swapped out all of Gerlach’s (population 500) old light-bulb’s and replaced them with compact fluorescents.

These would be considerable investments for a group of partiers that didn’t really care about their impact, but I think it’s fair to say they do, and next week I’ll talk about more of the smaller-scale environmentally-minded steps "Burners" were taking, including powering their dance music with biodiesel. I’ll also hit on a few of the other cool exhibits, like the CO2-to-algae display, and have some general conclusions about this year’s fest.

To be continued…

"The Green Man" from WorldChanging

"Crude Awakening Arises at Burning Man" from Wired