And 16-container ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world. Perhaps these ships are softer targets to correct than tens of millions of cars?
Can we have some proper references rather than the Daily Mail. Its the UK's equivalent of Fox news. They have a pro car owning readership, so any headline like this will be welcome to them
They produce as much sulfur as all the cars in the world (because cars don't produce very much sulfur). For other types of pollution, cars produce much more.
We started with industrial and home air pollution in the early and mid 20th century, driven by events such as the Great Smog of London. Smokestacks mandated, a great deal of process improvements on industrial sites, and natural gas & electric replaced coal in the home.
We basically solved most automobile car pollution over a period from the 1970's to the 1990's, with class ratings, better engines, catalytic convertors, and mandatory emissions checks, in jurisdictions with lots of people and not a lot of corruption.
That's over. Unless you live in a dysfunctional municipality controlled by the auto industry, or in a rural area where the pollution is so spread out it doesn't make much difference, you have mandatory emissions checks.
For the last ten years, and for the next ten years, we've been dealing with the problem in commercial trucks, a major share of interstate road traffic in the US. Progressively lower sulfur diesels implemented, catalytic converters mandated, and a supplement to the catalytic converters, a diesel particulate filter, mandated.
Regulations vary locally on the matter of small household engines, but the general trend for decades has been to phase out two-strokes in favor of simple four-strokes. A small two-stroke lawnmower will tend to be dirtier on some metrics than thousands of cars combined, and four-stroke engines have weight issues that may disallow handheld machines, so there is some consumer lament, but it's happening anyway. There's probably also some automotive emissions measures that will migrate to the larger ones.
As a result of all this, the road fleet is becoming exceedingly clean. The only things left to clean up are marine (bunker fuel), rail (bunker fuel) and small aviation (leaded avgas) engines, and we're at the beginning of the several-decade process of dealing with those.
Fuel sulfur content is both a primary emissions problem, and a signal. The catalysts required to cut particulate & VOC pollution down to negligible levels are apparently destroyed by sulfur, so it's only once you go to ultra-low-sulfur fuels that you get the option of cleaning up the exhaust. I'm not sure where that leaves sour crude suppliers.
The problem is the proximity of humans to cars. The results are form a study done at UofT Eng Dept. The crux of their findings were that it takes much longer than anticipated for the levels of 'pollution', in various form, to drop in concentration with distance from the source. I think the following excerpt from the UofT press release is the most intriguing[1];
“The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling,” says Evans. “Because they are over 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, they have a greater ability to penetrate deeper within the lung and travel in the body.”
On a typical summer day in Toronto, Evans’ instruments measure approximately 20,000 ultrafine particles in each cubic centimetre of air. This means that for every average breath, Torontonians are inhaling 10 million of these nano-sized particles. These numbers increases to 30,000 and 15 million in the winter, when there is more stagnant air and less evaporation of the compounds."
Myths again. Sulphur is a relatively local pollutant. Ship sulphur emissions have probably killed a lot of people every year in Europe. Some say thousands.
Well, that was until 2015, when the emissions regulations came into force!
Hurray for the European Union! Also Norway is participating.
Living in a state (Michigan) without any sort of vehicle inspections, I can usually spot a vehicle that will be especially bad well before I smell it. If I'm driving, I'll punch the recirculate button to head off the issue, and look at making lane changes (or even varying my route) to avoid vehicles. This doesn't work as well if I'm walking or biking, however.
I have asthma, so I'm especially sensitive to this. I'd love to see mandatory smog checks introduced here, but I know that this will never be politically feasible. At least our road salt tends to take old vehicles off the road fairly quickly...
Having grown up in Michigan (Detroit area), I'd say that Michigan has generally good air quality (excepting acute conditions like asthma) - as long as you live upwind of most other people and factories. That usually means more north and west. And it usually means more expensive real estate. IINM, this air-quality vs. socioeconomic pattern repeats itself across much of the industrial midwest and rust belt.
Maybe that's another reason you won't see smog checks - a lot of voters probably feel their air is fine, and those whose air has high particulate pollution may not vote much - either because the poor just vote less, or because they have bigger immediate problems than local air pollution.
This article would be more helpful with some historical context. At some point in the past, if all cars were equal, 90% of cars produced 90% of the pollution. Over time newer cars replaced most of the old ones, and now it's 25% of cars. But the overall amount of pollution has dropped too. A future clickbait headline will read "5% of cars cause 90% of the pollution!" and sound very alarming, but in fact that's a measure of progress in removing most of the remaining polluters.
If 5% of cars really caused 90% of the pollution in the future, then we should certainly banish those cars, shouldn't we? It would be a very informative title.
Here in Europe (well UK and Spain whee I have lived and owned a car) you need to get a check every year for older cars, and that includes an emissions test. Don't you get that in the States / Canada? (It would appear that the study was done in Canada).
Saying that, go to many less developed country and the cars are far worse condition.
My friend always used to claim that the environmental cost of producing a new car took 9 years to counter with the efficiencies in fuel consumption. No idea how true that is, anyone know?
We had a similar program in British Columbia, called AirCare. Unfortunately, people realized that you could use solutions to flush impurities out of your engine, and then if you let your gas tank get close to empty then put a quarter tank of premium in, your car would burn cleaner and get you a pass, even if it would normally fail.
Eventually the program was scrapped, due to fewer cars failing (8%, down from 14%, which is still too high IMHO), and likely as a way of gaining political capital with the public in advance of an election.
In many parts of the States you do, but the strictness of the test varies and the standards are grandfathered.
So, for example, in California (one of the strictest) you must pass a visual inspection, a tailpipe sniffer, and an engine computer scan. There are also many rules about acceptable engine modifications. In other states you may only get an engine computer scan.
As for standards, cars are (rather reasonably) held to the standard they were made to, not the standard of today, and modern cars really are dramatically less polluting than cars from several decades earlier.
Yes, Ontario (where the study was done), has such a program. An emissions test is required every 2 years on every car more than 7 years old.
The major loophole is that if your car fails, you only have to spend $450 to fix the problem. Spending $450 to improve emissions gives you a pass whether or not it actually fixed the problem or not.
Ontario uses a lot of salt in the winter, so there aren't a lot of old cars on the road.
Emissions tests in the US are at the state level, not federal. For instance, the state of Virginia has emissions tests. However, the state of South Carolina does not require a test.
It varies by region. The other commenters in this thread seem to be from Ontario. In Victoria, where I'm from, your car does not have to meet any kind of standards at all unless it is involved in a collision, in which case an insurance inspector will tell you what needs to be done (if it's an old car they usually tell you to scrap it), or a cop tells you to get it inspected (this is called a Vehicle Inspection ticket). Otherwise, it's sailing rules - anything that isn't expressly forbidden is allowed.
Across the water in Vancouver you do have to pass an emissions test.
In Canada (at least, the part I am in), you can get money if you turn in your old cars, if I remember correctly. They also made it that you must have an inspection done before selling/buying a car, and cars that are not road worthy cannot get sold.
People still find a way to drive, buy and sell pieces of scrap.
In Ontario, Canada the emissions tests are required, but not until the car has seen a lot use: "Generally, you need to get the test every 2 years, once your vehicle is 7 years old. Larger vehicles (called ‘heavy-duty’ vehicles) require the test every year, once they are 7 years old."
Not forgeting that for years official government advice (and tax breaks) was "buy diesal cars" which was wrong and is causing considerable death and illhealth and continued problems with air pollution.
In North Carolina the worst offenders are actually exempt from emissions test. Vehicles made before 1996 and diesel vehicles don't have to pass any sort of emissions tests.
I remember a pollution program in CA where they'd buy 20+ year old cars and junk them. Those cars made most of the pollution then.
This program was a pollution credit program. A factor met its pollution control program by cutting either its own or someone elses pollution by a statutory amount.
These days "air pollution" means a lot of different things.
This article is talking about air quality and particles, such as soot.
This impacts mostly the local air quality and environment, whereas CO2 is a global problem and impacts the climate in ways not necessarily detectable in the local environment.
What i allways ask myself is for example if someone has an old car which polutes more than a new one, what would polute more to buy a new one or to continue to use the old one. Because producing the new car releases a lot of polutants as well. I have never investigated this.
I would rather see a massive uptick in retrofitting newer engines into older cars; I've done it a couple of times on older Volvos (240-940 vintage) and other makes, after the engines got really tired. I'd imagine it's cheaper/easier to just manufacture better engines and ECMs than it is to manufacture new cars, and you get to keep cool old cars on the road.
Well you have to assume that if a car is serviceable it will be sold second hand so the pollution isn't really removed. But perhaps that person will be able to scrap an even worse car and the total pollution will go down.
This is why we should move from mandatory emissions checks on all vehicles, to spot checks of the worst vehicles (but we'd need to get the police excited to run a test.)
What does "badly tuned" mean? I feel like there is a need for a lot more clarity. Anyone have the source study (or know what it is). I'd like to know more.
Here's an article from almost 20 years ago, about the possibility of using roadside pollution detection to identify these bad vehicles: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9605/27/emissions/
It's not clear to me weather they included big trucks - the ones hauling stuff. They're diesels which make more particulates and in large quantity. If they are not included, then they should be, because it would be stupid to further regulate cars until we know if they're actually making most of the pollution.
I can't find the article but Google used to think that replacing cars and coal plants(with clean coal) would be enough to curb CO2 emissions but a new study they just released(last 6 months I think) said it wouldn't matter at all. That has changed their strategy from clean coal to carbon sequestration.
Spend 5 mins on the road in Missouri and you'll see 100 new cars go by with a scant trace of engine noise, and 1 1994 geo metro missing an exhaust, plastic wrap over one window, two doors of different colors, with the driver on a cell phone smoking a pack of Pall Malls, riding on 3 bald tires and a spare, with the rusted tail pipe spewing white smoke. They pull into quick trip and run inside for a bottle of oil so they can fill up the engine before they pump their gas.
Once again, liberal regulations new cars hardly solves any problems, but looks great for pleasing the voters of "blue states." ...sort of like providing tax credits for new home owners for energy efficient homes... Where apartment complexes have air conditioners from 1970 and the tenants pay the electric bills. All these regulations just add cost to doing business without providing any real benefit to the environment. But the regulations buy votes, so why not?
If we want this changed, we really have to start voting for science, which currently, neither party can associate with. Stupid stupid stupid.
When I see a car that seems to be putting out a visible and/or smellable amount of smoke/soot/smog, are these the worst polluters? I guess what I'm asking is if visible inspection is a reliable way of detecting these vehicles?
As a programmer my first impression when I read this (if this is actually true) is: "Nice, when we fix those, we'll have done good on car-induced air pollution".
[+] [-] SCAQTony|11 years ago|reply
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
[+] [-] collyw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mapt|11 years ago|reply
We started with industrial and home air pollution in the early and mid 20th century, driven by events such as the Great Smog of London. Smokestacks mandated, a great deal of process improvements on industrial sites, and natural gas & electric replaced coal in the home.
We basically solved most automobile car pollution over a period from the 1970's to the 1990's, with class ratings, better engines, catalytic convertors, and mandatory emissions checks, in jurisdictions with lots of people and not a lot of corruption.
That's over. Unless you live in a dysfunctional municipality controlled by the auto industry, or in a rural area where the pollution is so spread out it doesn't make much difference, you have mandatory emissions checks.
For the last ten years, and for the next ten years, we've been dealing with the problem in commercial trucks, a major share of interstate road traffic in the US. Progressively lower sulfur diesels implemented, catalytic converters mandated, and a supplement to the catalytic converters, a diesel particulate filter, mandated.
Regulations vary locally on the matter of small household engines, but the general trend for decades has been to phase out two-strokes in favor of simple four-strokes. A small two-stroke lawnmower will tend to be dirtier on some metrics than thousands of cars combined, and four-stroke engines have weight issues that may disallow handheld machines, so there is some consumer lament, but it's happening anyway. There's probably also some automotive emissions measures that will migrate to the larger ones.
As a result of all this, the road fleet is becoming exceedingly clean. The only things left to clean up are marine (bunker fuel), rail (bunker fuel) and small aviation (leaded avgas) engines, and we're at the beginning of the several-decade process of dealing with those.
Fuel sulfur content is both a primary emissions problem, and a signal. The catalysts required to cut particulate & VOC pollution down to negligible levels are apparently destroyed by sulfur, so it's only once you go to ultra-low-sulfur fuels that you get the option of cleaning up the exhaust. I'm not sure where that leaves sour crude suppliers.
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcseco|11 years ago|reply
“The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling,” says Evans. “Because they are over 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, they have a greater ability to penetrate deeper within the lung and travel in the body.”
On a typical summer day in Toronto, Evans’ instruments measure approximately 20,000 ultrafine particles in each cubic centimetre of air. This means that for every average breath, Torontonians are inhaling 10 million of these nano-sized particles. These numbers increases to 30,000 and 15 million in the winter, when there is more stagnant air and less evaporation of the compounds."
[1]http://news.engineering.utoronto.ca/traffic-emissions-may-po...
[+] [-] qanael|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|11 years ago|reply
Hurray for the European Union! Also Norway is participating.
http://www.imo.org/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/44-ECA-s...
http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/2011/AN2-11/ship-pollution-c...
[+] [-] seany|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] easytiger|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] organsnyder|11 years ago|reply
I have asthma, so I'm especially sensitive to this. I'd love to see mandatory smog checks introduced here, but I know that this will never be politically feasible. At least our road salt tends to take old vehicles off the road fairly quickly...
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|11 years ago|reply
Maybe that's another reason you won't see smog checks - a lot of voters probably feel their air is fine, and those whose air has high particulate pollution may not vote much - either because the poor just vote less, or because they have bigger immediate problems than local air pollution.
[+] [-] sgustard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danmaz74|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|11 years ago|reply
Saying that, go to many less developed country and the cars are far worse condition.
My friend always used to claim that the environmental cost of producing a new car took 9 years to counter with the efficiencies in fuel consumption. No idea how true that is, anyone know?
[+] [-] danudey|11 years ago|reply
Eventually the program was scrapped, due to fewer cars failing (8%, down from 14%, which is still too high IMHO), and likely as a way of gaining political capital with the public in advance of an election.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
So, for example, in California (one of the strictest) you must pass a visual inspection, a tailpipe sniffer, and an engine computer scan. There are also many rules about acceptable engine modifications. In other states you may only get an engine computer scan.
As for standards, cars are (rather reasonably) held to the standard they were made to, not the standard of today, and modern cars really are dramatically less polluting than cars from several decades earlier.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|11 years ago|reply
The major loophole is that if your car fails, you only have to spend $450 to fix the problem. Spending $450 to improve emissions gives you a pass whether or not it actually fixed the problem or not.
Ontario uses a lot of salt in the winter, so there aren't a lot of old cars on the road.
[+] [-] nikomen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kluny|11 years ago|reply
Across the water in Vancouver you do have to pass an emissions test.
[+] [-] Raphmedia|11 years ago|reply
People still find a way to drive, buy and sell pieces of scrap.
[+] [-] oalders|11 years ago|reply
http://www.ontario.ca/environment-and-energy/drive-clean-tes...
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32512152
[+] [-] pkaye|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danmaz74|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|11 years ago|reply
This program was a pollution credit program. A factor met its pollution control program by cutting either its own or someone elses pollution by a statutory amount.
[+] [-] janvidar|11 years ago|reply
This impacts mostly the local air quality and environment, whereas CO2 is a global problem and impacts the climate in ways not necessarily detectable in the local environment.
[+] [-] koolkat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpcope1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|11 years ago|reply
1: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/201...
[+] [-] 7952|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukilot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchrisa|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulshapiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IvyMike|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaunrussell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|11 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=small+engine+polution
[+] [-] neuromancer2701|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headShrinker|11 years ago|reply
I read this article a few years ago, and following article illustrates the point very well.
http://www.mpgillusion.com/p/what-is-mpg-illusion.html
[+] [-] exabrial|11 years ago|reply
Spend 5 mins on the road in Missouri and you'll see 100 new cars go by with a scant trace of engine noise, and 1 1994 geo metro missing an exhaust, plastic wrap over one window, two doors of different colors, with the driver on a cell phone smoking a pack of Pall Malls, riding on 3 bald tires and a spare, with the rusted tail pipe spewing white smoke. They pull into quick trip and run inside for a bottle of oil so they can fill up the engine before they pump their gas.
Once again, liberal regulations new cars hardly solves any problems, but looks great for pleasing the voters of "blue states." ...sort of like providing tax credits for new home owners for energy efficient homes... Where apartment complexes have air conditioners from 1970 and the tenants pay the electric bills. All these regulations just add cost to doing business without providing any real benefit to the environment. But the regulations buy votes, so why not?
If we want this changed, we really have to start voting for science, which currently, neither party can associate with. Stupid stupid stupid.
[+] [-] alwaysdoit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VeejayRampay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _lce0|11 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
[+] [-] task_queue|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]