https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Fog-brings-p...
I think one of the problems is even with tough regulation that we have here in California, it's hard to control the actions of all individuals.
We have "spare the air days" and half my neighbors houses still have smoke coming out of their chimneys on those days because they use wood to heat their homes. You can narc them out and report them however the current workaround is for them to claim it's backyard pizza ovens as there is a loophole for cooking food.
When I leave for work in the morning or come home at night and see all the smoke rising laugh to myself that everyone we live nearby is having a massive backyard pizza party and we are not invited! :(
There's also this ridiculously persistent anti electric vehicle roll coal trend happening right now on Tik Tok and platforms where the current fox tag objective a lot of people play on CB radios is to bag a Tesla - benchmark used to be to bag a Prius. I only know about this mainly because my old coworker commuted from Placerville to San Mateo and was obsessed with playing fox tag on his commutes (which would make sense if you're a mega commuter trying to stay awake so making up dumb nicknames with your friends and all keeping each other awake on your CB radios and talking as you drive sounds fun to you).
Anyways... I've just sort of internalized the fact that more and more nonsmokers here are all going to die of lung cancer and hopefully the research and cell therapy trials will get there first before I and my family go out. :(
I don't really understand what this is. What do "fox tag" and "roll coal" mean?
I'm all for working toward better air quality, and electric vehicles definitely reduce greenhouse (and other) gas emissions. At the same time, pollution from cars is not just from exhaust emissions due to combustion. I recall reading somewhere that 80% or more of particulate matter pollution from cars comes from tires and brakes. So the notion of replacing all combustion engine cars with electric cars will somehow solve the pollution issue is not realistic. The Tesla Cybertruck might be a great vehicle, but it's heavy (large tires and lots of break wear). We need better solutions.
If someone knows more precise math, please share.
If you’re this study posted here before, it was just extrapolating based on weight of ice vehicles and is therefore largely useless in estimating the air quality impact of regenerative braking vehicles.
https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IPWEA/c7e19de0-...
> For example, a vehicle with an axle weight of 1000 kg is considered to cause 16 times the damage compared with a vehicle with an axle weight of 500 kg.
It seems the 4th power law might actually be more accurate than I thought. If the vehicles can damage the road proportional the fourth power of their weight, surely there is significantly more wear on the wheels (the only part touching the road) than just a linear increase in weight?
My hunch, and again I want someone to provide a more accurate model, is the wear would be proportional the third power of weight.
EDIT: I found something, and it is complicated.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16878140177000...
Figure 6 is what we're interested in, although you won't understand it without reading everything before it. It's definitely not linear, but it seems to roughly come out to something like the 3rd power, but it really depends (honestly you should click that link, there are so many variables).
EDIT EDIT: Here we go!
https://www.academia.edu/24153619/Tyre_Wear_Model_Validation...
So it seems to be somewhere between the second and third power of weight.
Assuming tire wear is directly proportional to particle emissions (I have no idea if this is true), that would mean (using the 80% of emissions coming from tires number cited in an earlier comment, and EVs being roughly 10% heavier on average) that EVs are actually worse for air quality! This is lumping together brakes and tires though, which could be wrong. Although I am certain there is at least a second power effect from braking from vehicle weight. But as another commenter mentioned, regenerative braking (while not unique to electric vehicles, I think this is a fair contrast) will benefit the EV greatly here. Also it's worth mentioning that while EVs lose, it's not by a huge amount (but it seems to be enough to be measurable).
So like most things, "it's complicated."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...
> The authors regret that as Victor Timmers did not carry out the research under the auspices of the University of Edinburgh, nor in collaboration or consultation with any personnel at the University of Edinburgh, the affiliation of “University of Edinburgh” has now been removed from this work at the request of the Institution. In addition, subsequent to the publication of the Paper, Victor Timmers has disclosed a potential Conflict of Interest with regard to the work, namely: “non-financial support from Innas B.V, during the conduct of the study”.
Other studies show real benefits https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/2/84/htm
Plus, it typically only applies to Semis as their engine braking is especially noisy. On a typical gas powered sedan you would be hard pressed to identify that someone is engine braking unless you were right next to it. Being prosecuted for it would be even more exceptional.
Besides, who drives stick anymore? I've driven stick since I learned to drive forty years ago, and I even I admit that I can't do better than a computer-controlled DCT, on performance or fuel efficiency. Next car is either electric (we already have a Leaf), or DCT if we must.
This seems like a bad tradeoff. Increasing wear on expensive, hard to replace parts (your engine and transmission), so that you can save on relatively inexpensive, easy to replace parts (your brake pads)
So that's not actually the tradeoff you're making. More to the point you run a much higher risk of acute failure with brakes than with anything else. When that happens on a downgrade you can't stop. If you were actually increasing wear on piston rings (a laughable argument at best) you might end up needing to rebuild the engine after a few decades.
But it could be bad for your piston rings and catalytic converter [2], so there's that...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_braking#Gasoline_engine...
[2] https://ricksfreeautorepairadvice.com/engine-braking-cause-d...
Oil in your catalytic converter isn't good, but that's why you have one or more spark plugs per cylinder — to burn it. There's the issue of heavy metals in the oil (e.g. zinc – generally in the form of ZDDP) that can damage your cat, sure, but that's why the current API specs have reduced the amount of allowable zinc a revision or so ago (API SN or SM I believe). Zinc is a great anti-wear additive but in high enough concentration can damage your cat.
Stop and go traffic will wear your clutch out (assuming we're talking cars with dry plate clutches here and not a motorcycle or anything else with a wet clutch). Engine braking will not (assuming you're not riding the brakes or constantly shifting while trying to slow down). Hell, even if you are downshifting needlessly if you're rev matching you're not wearing the clutch all that much. I'll take this fictitious clutch wear over acute brake failure thank you very much. In fact I've yet to destroy a cat or clutch in San Francisco traffic.
Uh, no.
And, an educated guess here, probably increased emissions on the overrun.
Also, no. Most cars built in the last 30+ years will stop injecting fuel during overrun.
Last article or paper I read on the topic counted particulates drafted from the ground as emissions, which of course EVs do not reduce much. But there's still much less nocive emissions, and doesn't smell as bad...
A good start is fixing our land-use regulation in the US to:
* Allow apartments https://www.sightline.org/2019/11/27/end-apartment-bans-to-s...
* Allow things people need day to day near where they live: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/6/complete-neighb... - if they still have to drive, it won't be as far, and more people will be able to walk and bike.
I can't find an exact % for how many people in CA heat with wood, but it looks to be <3%. It could be much higher for you locally if you live in a rural area, but for state-wide pollution, I think it's mostly irrelevant.
That doesn't make them good (for places with pollution issues, wood isn't entirely bad as an energy source) or things to encourage, but I don't know that they're worth focusing on on either.
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The reason cited by the article for worsening air quality in the West is wildfires.
Wood burning (not even special low pollution devices) is not permitted in new construction in the Bay Area because of how much effect even a small percentage of homes can have on air quality.
That area is on top of a mercury mine - there's a reason it's called "Almaden Quicksilver County Park", because the primary economic activity before it became a preserve was mercury mining. The southern Santa Cruz mountains sits on top of a massive mercury deposit.
I'd really like to see the evidence that it's because of the fog. When you have pervasive elevated mercury levels throughout the food chain in an area that's a natural mercury deposit, the obvious explanation is that animals, plants, and fungi are picking it up from the soil, rather than it's being wafted in through the fog. (Mercury is quite heavy and isn't soluble in water, so the idea that the fog somehow wafts it in strikes me as bullshit.)
https://aqicn.org/city/guadalajara/
But OMG, Nepal: http://aqicn.org/city/india/patna/igsc-planetarium-complex/
Or New Delhi: http://aqicn.org/city/delhi/national-institute-of-malaria-re...
It used to be that bad in the US, when it was as poor as Nepal is today.
Inflation adjusted, of course.