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25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

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Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#141

Post by justin66 »

rconti wrote: post #82
nikomen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem odd that the state requires safety inspections but doesn't require emissions tests in every jurisdiction.

And in California, which is often considered the strictest state ever invented by man, we have stringent emissions tests but no safety inspection at all! It really confuses all of the California-bashers when you tell them that.

There's a logic to it. A person who values their safety - most do! - has an incentive to deal with safety issues, regardless of whether they are compelled. Less so with emissions issues.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#142

Post by usefulcat »

sliverstorm wrote: post #24
organsnyder wrote: post #18

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 l…

Why would mandatory smog checks never be politically feasible? They are not just a California-only thing.

Couldn't the federal government require it? For example, I know that a number of the most populous counties in Texas require vehicle emissions tests as part of the annual inspection. This being Texas, it's a good bet that they didn't voluntarily decide to do this. With the possible exception of Travis county (Austin).

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#143

Post by sliverstorm »

michael_h wrote: post #103
sliverstorm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) h…

Even in California, there are exemptions for: "hybrids, motorcycles, trailers, or gasoline powered vehicles 1975 and older." ...which seems shortsighted. Except for trailers, all of those can have mechanical problems that cause it to pollute far more than they should. My daily driver for a long time was from 1974 and I was never sure why older cars were exempt. If it's a hobby car with historic plates, sure, but if y…

Motorcycles trail cars in emissions improvements & regulations, but they follow nonetheless. Things like electronic fuel injection was not practical on motorcycles until more recent times.

Part of the rationale with the 1975 exemption is that vehicles 1975 and older represent a very small portion of the number of cars on the road, and are driven far fewer miles than average. That beautiful 1966 Corvette didn't last fifty years by being driven every day.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#144

Post by sliverstorm »

usefulcat wrote: post #142
sliverstorm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would mandatory smog checks never be politically feasible? They are not just a California-only thing.

Couldn't the federal government require it? For example, I know that a number of the most populous counties in Texas require vehicle emissions tests as part of the annual inspection. This being Texas, it's a good bet that they didn't voluntarily decide to do this. With the possible exception of Travis county (Austin).

There are a great many things the federal government could require, but the US is in a constant tug-of-war between federal powers and states rights. Similar to the EU vs its member nations.

Emissions standards for new vehicles is regulated by the EPA.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#145

Post by baddox »

WalterBright wrote: post #137
baddox wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does an old car with bad emissions have to last before it's worse than the environmental impact of replacing it with a new car?

There's also the energy cost and pollution of manufacturing a new car.

That's what I'm asking about.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#146

Post by curun1r »

lloeki wrote: post #128
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as whacky comparisons go, I'd always wanted to do some back of the envelope calculation comparing smokers' CO2 output to cars'. Also, always wonder how much cigarette filters (that are supposed to capture various chemicals) that get thrown on the floor could contribute to (e.g.) water pollution, if at all.

It's a pretty easy calculation considering smoking is basically carbon neutral. Almost all the carbon in a cigarette was removed from the environment by the tobacco plant when it was growing and gets returned to the environment when smoked. At most, cigarettes redistribute carbon from the regions where they grow tobacco to the places where the cigarettes are smoked. If anything, cigarettes deposit a small percentage of its carbon into the lungs of smokers which, after the smoker dies and is buried, is essentially removed from the atmosphere.

However this is only the case for CO2...as you mentioned, cigarettes have a bunch of other nasty chemicals that become pollution when smoked.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#147

Post by 7952 »

koolkat wrote: post #28

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.

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.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#148

Post by mapt »

SCAQTony wrote: post #15

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? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

These are the last remaining targets.

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.

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#149

Post by rmason »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #92
organsnyder wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to having a fairly large libertarian-leaning contingent (especially in rural areas), people in Michigan tend to associate personal vehicles with "freedom" at a level probably unmatched anywhere in the country (if not the world).

Michigan is unusually conservative/libertarian. Its a shame children, the elderly, and those with lung conditions pay for this misguided philosophy with their health.

Reality is that it is a Democratic leaning state that hasn't gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988. All the Republican governors in my lifetime have been moderates with the possible exception of Engler who was elected on Reagan's coattails.

http://www.270towin.com/states/Michigan

Re: 25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution

#150

Post by mapt »

mapt wrote: post #148
SCAQTony wrote: post #15

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? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

These are the last remaining targets . 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 ratin…

I maintain that, with the rise in ship size, and progress in reactor design, we should re-open the issue of the civilian nuclear fleet. Ships have gotten three times as large in just the last ten years to conserve fuel and serve the globalized economy. Fuel is still 90%+ of their cost structure. The Maersk Triple E class wouldn't even feel weather conditions that would have destroyed the NSS Savanah, and we have developed exceedingly fine bathymetric guidance systems since that era to avoid grounding. We can build proliferation-resistant (piracy-friendly), passively safe reactors without even utilizing the basic nuclear navy 100% failsafe strategy of dumping the reactor in several pieces into deep water to avoid meltdown if cooling systems become overwhelmed. We have had to use that failsafe, best as we can tell, precisely zero times over 5400 reactor-years of the US Navy.
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