Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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Why does everyone concentrate on fucking cars? Cars are not the problem, the 15 biggest ships cause more pollution than ALL cars worldwide ([0]).

The problems are ships (which burn stuff that's essentially waste and generally have no form of emissions treatments [1]), locomotives (these burn diesel, but again, the vast fleet of old diesel locos doesn't carry any adequate filters [2]), wood furnaces (in poor countries, where anything that burns is used to heat and cook [3]), and factories where no money is available to get their emissions under control ([3]).

Also, to clarify, I'm not after greenhouse gases, but after the stuff that actually kills people. Greenhouse emissions are nasty but as others have noted, agriculture is to blame here and not cars or anything else.

[0]: http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/

[1]: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Environmental_issues

[2]: http://www.russfrei-fuers-klima.de/themen/schienenverkehr/ (german unfortunately)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Eastern_China_smog#Causes (though I have to admit, it's coal, not wood, but the result is the same)

Of course one of the interesting things about ships is that they spew their particulates over the ocean where rains knock them out of the air and into the sea.

But the wierd thing is that in terms of cargo tons carried, the larger ships pollute less only because the marginal cost of fuel of carrying another container is lower than the marginal cost of adding another ship.

So the crappy polluting ships are having an unknown effect on the oceans but having less and less of an effect as more and more cargo is carried by fewer and fewer ships.

Proximity matters. Kids living close to highways are more likely to get asthma. That being said, only half of the risk is linked to nearby highways, and regional pollution matters too. But you're just making yourself sound like a doofus by saying "cars are not the problem".

> But you're just making yourself sound like a doofus by saying "cars are not the problem".

Everyone and his mother focuses on cars. Even a 50% reduction on new cars will take DECADES until a meaningful impact on the total car emissions! Old cars get resold to Africa or other poorer continents, so the impact of new cars is next to zero!

Meanwhile, the container, cruise and other heavy ship industry belches emissions on multiple orders of magnitude than these savings. Fix fifteen fucking ships and you save in a single year more pollutants than you could save in a decade by stripping 10% of worldwide car emissions.

If you're comparing fixing only new cars as they are sold to fixing ships immeadiately, it's obvious which will have a quicker effect.

However, car emission testing programs already exist which force the driver to do repairs to their existing car.

Pollution deaths are still mostly a local/regional problem, so fixing ship emissions is a problem for port cities, while fixing car emissions is a problem for everyone who lives near a major road.

Well, it's easier to fix ships than cars, simply because of numbers (15 ships vs 760 m cars).

> However, car emission testing programs already exist which force the driver to do repairs to their existing car.

Repairs, yes. But repairs only set the car back to whatever standard applied when it got introduced. Retrofitting is theoretically possible, but at a huge expense to the car owner. And tbh I rather see huge shipping co.s having to pay for upgrading their ships than the often poor people stuck owning a beat-up car.

> while fixing car emissions is a problem for everyone who lives near a major road.

Problem is that the only real fix is diverting the traffic or eliminating it altogether. Due to the high percentage of old cars on the road new emissions standards are useless for immediate fixes.

The article states that cars are a health problem. No one said that we should only address cars and ignore the other problems.

"Recently, officials in Milan temporarily barred cars from the city; in Rome, too, persistent smog has forced the authorities to limit the use of private vehicles. Back in March, Paris was enveloped in a gray cloud of choking fumes that obscured the Eiffel Tower for hours and briefly earned the French capital the title of the world’s most polluted city, beating out even Beijing. An air quality expert in Britain reported that much of it was “stale diesel” from traffic emissions generated in European cities."

None of your citations state that those sources are empirically worse (in terms of human health impact) than vehicle emissions. Also, different places have wildly different sources of pollutants. It is ridiculous to generalise across the whole world based on a few factoids.

> Also, different places have wildly different sources of pollutants. It is ridiculous to generalise across the whole world based on a few factoids.

Indeed, but no matter how you look at the data (and where), stuff like banning cars from roads is a placebo measure, given the slow share of cars in said pollutants.

The most problematic point, very often overlooked, is that factory chimneys (and, to a lesser degree, ship chimneys) belch their smoke in higher air, which means that the pollutants in the smoke can fly for hundreds of kilometers before coming down on the earth and causing problems.

But there is an easy way to test that. Is pollution abnormally high close to a congested road? In some places that is unequivocally true, and altering the outputs of vehicles will make the air safer in those locations. That is not a placebo.

Also, the entire purpose of a chimney is to spread the emissions over a larger area...

> the dispersion of pollutants at higher altitudes can reduce their impact on the immediate surroundings. In the case of chemically aggressive output, a sufficiently tall chimney can allow for partial or complete self-neutralization of airborne chemicals before they reach ground level. The dispersion of pollutants over a greater area can reduce their concentrations and facilitate compliance with regulatory limits. [0]

It is certainly true that stack emissions can have a significant health impact (for example coal power stations in China). But there are also places where the effect is less significant as the ambient level is considered to be safe. Vehicle emissions can cause local levels to be much higher.

I agree that certain sources are popularly ignored, but that is not a reason to also ignore vehicle emissions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney

> Is pollution abnormally high close to a congested road? In some places that is unequivocally true, and altering the outputs of vehicles will make the air safer in those locations.

The problem is: vehicles have a freaking high life time if they're not destroyed in accidents. Even if all new cars by tomorrow were electric, it'd take years for these new cars to replace the old cars (and thus solving the problem of local pollution).

To make stuff worse, old cars are usually exported to Africa (http://www.zeit.de/auto/2010-01/auto-export-afrika) where they basically run until they cannot be patched up any more and of course, once e.g. a soot filter breaks down in Africa, no one will replace it.

All this "uuh our vehicles must be cleaner" is just bla bla of the industry to sell more new (and, because of more complex technology, more expensive!) cars. The actual impact of these measures is next to zero because of a car's afterlife in Africa or wherever.

Mandating proper emission filtering on all factories around a city helps immediately, mandating stricter emissions on new cars does nothing at all.

If I recall, all that you cited above is far less damaging than livestock agriculture.

Depends on the pollutants. What I cited above is mostly particulate or toxic pollutants, livestock is a greenhouse-only problem.

Would be more convincing to whip out some measurements.

At least wood stoves are carbon neutral.

> At least wood stoves are carbon neutral.

Only if you grow a unit of mass of wood at the same rate at which you burn it. Otherwise the stove actively transfers carbon from forests to atmosphere.

Pretty sure the statement about wood stoves, is not actual wood but what is described in many countries as pellets. In many poor countries they tend to use pellets and in many cases have been known to burn garbage as well as a heat source.

Kraków in Poland is ranked as one of the worst cities in Europe in terms of air quality with these pellets as a leading cause.

Source: http://www.krakowpost.com/6285/2015/11/krakows-air-quality-a...

I visited Uganda once, wood stoves + limited electricity + population growth = pretty severe deforestation. The pollution in Kampala, jeepers...... unbelievably sad given how beautiful the natural environment is.

The pellets are made from wood (rather than eg coal or other fossil fuels), the wood is just concentrated and processed to provide more calories of energy in a smaller more consistent package, to use wood byproducts like sawdust that don't start out easily burnable for fuel without processing, and to provide a perfectly consistent product that will always burn the same way with the same calories per gram.

If so, whatever is true of wood stoves is true of them, as far as carbon neutrality. It's the same resource. I guess burning wood is 'carbon neutral'? I guess, unlike fossil fuels, it is 'sustainable', in the sense that more can be grown?

It can still be awfully polluting. I think most modern pellet burning stoves actually emit less pollution than burning straight wood, because they burn more efficiently. But 'less' does not mean 'not'.

The problem is not greenhouse gases, it's the other pollutants that are caused by burning. Inadequate oxygen supply produces soot and carbon monoxide, and "trash wood" like e.g. wood that was used in train tracks or in buildings or in furniture is treated with all kinds of chemicals (flame retardants, oils and other residue from trains, plastics, paint) which turn very nasty when burned.

I'm not an expert but I have family in the Krakow area and used to live there, and everyone I know burned coal (and trash) for heating. Not so many people used pellets, although I did hear about them too.

Thanks for the citations!

(was: citation needed)

OP may be referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102

"15 Biggest Ships Create More Pollution Than All Cars in the World (2013)"

In progress. I thought that stuff was common knowledge, I was most apparently mistaken.

Emissions over the ocean are not a significant public health issue.

Yes, because global warming isn't at all a public health issue.

CO2 emission is different from things like NOx emission though, not? Poisonous gas and gas causing greenhouse effect create different problems and I think might also call for different solutions.

Check the data: livestock agriculture far outweighs internal combustion engines in quantity of greenhouse emissions.

According to the EPA, not true for the US.

http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/agric...

I also wonder about humans vs agriculture for gas emissions. What's worse?

This post is about NOx emissions, not CO2, and the post I was responding to explicitly wasn't about CO2. Again, emissions over the ocean are not a problem.

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