What if Santa delivered all his presents by bus instead of by reindeer?

The CheckMyBus elves have made some calculations of Santa's carbon footprint and the results are worrying.  If Santa really wanted to go green on Christmas Eve, he’d be well advised to use the greenest mode of transportation available: buses.

It is estimated that Santa’s 212m-mile round-the-world dash releases 35.4 billion lbs CO2.

To complete the 212-million-mile trip in 24 hours, Santa’s reindeer will have to travel at 8.8 million miles per hour (11,000x faster than the speed of sound) while pulling a 320,000 tons-heavy sleigh (assuming all children on Earth -naughty kids & Santa non-believers excluded- get a regular-sized Lego set, weighing about 2 lbs).

It is estimated that a reindeer’s methane emissions on Christmas Eve can reach up to 171 million lbs of methane but, with methane being 23 times more potent than CO2, this number can grow to a whopping 3.9 billion lbs of CO2 per reindeer. All in all, Santa and his gang will end up releasing 167.08 lbs of CO2 per mile.

Instead, if Santa traveled by bus he would be saving us all from environmental Armageddon.

Buses emit a mere 0.19 lbs CO2 per mile meaning that Santa would save basically all of his carbon footprint if he traveled by bus - 35.3 billion lbs CO2, to be exact. 35.3 billion lbs of CO2 is the same CO2 sequestered by 411 million Christmas trees. Planting 411 million trees would be enough to cover New York City 6 times over (1.9 million acres of surface, or 3,000 square miles).

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