25% of Cars Cause 90% of Automobile Air Pollution
ecosalon.com
ecosalon.com
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
NRDC info graphic: http://www.nrdc.org/international/files/china-controlling-po...
Industry Tap: http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo...
The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...
Note the inclusion of the word 'can' before produce. Making this statistic unreliable without further support.
From Wikipedia (section of Environmental impact of shipping: Conventional Pollutants)
"...Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9 percent of the sulphur oxides.[15] [16] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings. When inhaled the sulfur is known to cause respiratory problems and even increases the risk of a heart attack.[17] According to Irene Blooming, a spokeswoman for the European environmental coalition Seas at Risk, the fuel used in oil tankers and container ships is high in sulfur and cheaper to buy compared to the fuel used for domestic land use. "A ship lets out around 50 times more sulfur than a lorry per metric tonne of cargo carried."[17] Cities in the U.S. like Long Beach, Los Angeles, Houston, Galveston, and Pittsburgh see some of the heaviest shipping traffic in the nation and have left local officials desperately trying to clean up the air.[18]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippin...
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...
Not really, it's more like something in between the National Enquirer and the New York Post in terms of journalistic quality. Doesn't really make sense to compare it to TV news.
However this is only the case for CO2...as you mentioned, cigarettes have a bunch of other nasty chemicals that become pollution when smoked.
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.
Recent state and federal regulations have made this less a problem.
there was a push to improve shore-power options for these ships a while back, but i'm not sure where it went. probably deemed to costly or intrusive by the shippers.
http://www.portoflosangeles.org/environment/alt_maritime_pow...
There has been push back from cargo shippers, but cruise ships are using it. The port of LA has been pretty forward-looking about improving operations efficiency.
“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...
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...
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...
The automakers resisted adding smog equipment (which did increase costs), but that battle is already lost. They already make exclusively 49- and 50-state emissions legal vehicles.
This is the state that wants to revoke healthcare from victims of automobile accidents ( http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2015/04/senate_c... ). Automobile manufacturers and related industry still controls most of the state.
It's hard to overstate how small the chance of smog checks happening in Michigan is.
http://www.dmv.org/insurance/medical-payments-coverage.php
So would many people see a drop in coverage? Probably. Would people be able to obtain medical coverage for injuries resulting from a car accident? Almost certainly.
(My ill informed cynical assumption is that insurers are funding the push to change the system, with the expectation that they will be able to profit more under the proposed changes)
The problem is you can drive a vehicle that's burning coolant or oil and just spewing a cloud behind it and nothing is really stopping you. I'm not sure if you can actually get a ticket for it or not.
Yeah, there are less, but on a summer weekend in Southern California you can expect fumes from a number of car-culture enthusiasts and their cars.
My favorite : Carbureted rotaries. The smell of unbalanced air-fuel ratio plus the smell of motor oil being burned in combustion. It's like the two-stroke of the streets. Even better when it has lost a coolant seal and you get that nice sticky white-blue coolant component to the noxious cloud left behind.
The thing is, living in Michigan, I notice a lot more older carburated trucks than I do smoking modern vehicles...
Pre '75 there was nothing to control oxides of nitrogen, which smell pretty awful, and combustion was never clean enough back then to control volatiles and hydrocarbons. I think all they had were secondary air injection, which was prone to failure and subsequent removal
You may not remember the smell, but do you remember the color of the L.A. skyline?
Emissions standards for new vehicles is regulated by the EPA.
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.
Much of this is due to us being down-wind of Chicago: http://www.epa.gov/med/grosseile_site/indicators/air-polluti...
I remember visiting LA from MI when I was a kid in the 80s and "tasting" smog in the air for the first time. Admittedly LA has gotten a bit better since then.
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?
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.
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.
...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 you're driving it every day you should have to follow the same rules as everybody else. In my defense, my old car got 68 mpg and was well fussed-over.
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.
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.
In places where there's no extended winter weather I've noticed the cars are often older, with 40+ year old junkers from the 1980s looking, by local standards, no more than ten years old.
Any surprise that emissions tests are required in Fairfax and Arlington, but not in Bland County? Largest city in Bland County has a population of 75; it is a different world from the DC suburbs.
Testing is generally done via the OBD-II port, so the vehicle self-reports it's condition. Vehicles without OBD-II and "other" vehicles use a tailpipe probe to report on exhaust gases.
Across the water in Vancouver you do have to pass an emissions test.
People still find a way to drive, buy and sell pieces of scrap.
http://www.ontario.ca/environment-and-energy/drive-clean-tes...
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.
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.
I'd like to see a more thorough emissions test be implemented (i.e. more than testing at two speeds, enough to gauge all operating conditions) so that it could be more objective in its process. This would also have the benefit of allowing a way to bypass the restrictive modification exception system.
1: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/201...
For instance, my fun car had a persistent miss that made it basically undrivable. It took me something like 20-30 hours to find the issues and fix them. I have OBD2 scanners (the real deal, not the toys), all the tools needed, and the ability to read the service manuals and follow the dianostic proceedures.
Someone driving an old pile, isn’t likely to have the time, know how, or funds to fix the old car. So instead of spending $5k to fix the thing, they spend $300/mo on a new (or new to them) car.
You can see a lot of details here. http://www.rff.org/Documents/RFF-DP-99-23-REV.pdf Also, repairs often increase fuel economy so not only do city's become far more livable again the net cost is fairly low.
But as others have said, there is better low hanging fruit to go after rather than older cars.
Edit: more links!
Naomi Zimmerman's webpage: http://naomizimmerman.com/publications/
Abstract of the relevant paper: http://atmos-meas-tech-discuss.net/8/2881/2015/amtd-8-2881-2...
This PDF is labelled "supplemental" but it looks like the full text of the paper. http://atmos-meas-tech-discuss.net/8/2881/2015/amtd-8-2881-2...
I wonder how much could be attributed to old cars instead. That's something that would be easily measured by identifying the cars. But that may open a different can of worms if they determine people with the oldest cars are the biggest polluters* because it could be seen as an attack on the poor.
* Odds are the old cars are the biggest polluters.. less efficient to start with, more likely to be out of tune, more worn parts, etc. But I don't have any data to state that as a conclusion.
The SOCAAR facility has operated at this roadside location since 2006 and is one of the largest air quality research lab in Canada.
Over the years, we have routinely seen peaks in CO2 as vehicles pass our monitoring station. However, when some vehicles pass, we also see NOx, black carbon or ultrafine particle peak(s).
While we have video footage of the road, it can be extremely difficult to link the measurements to a single passing vehicle. Identifying these vehicles and why their emissions are different from the rest of the vehicle fleet is where the research our heading.
Bad air-fuel ratios also cause lots of pollution due to unburned fuel being sent out the tailpipe. I would think that this is less common with fuel-injected vehicles, but there are still plenty of old carburated vehicles on the road, especially where road salt isn't used.
On some high performance cars you can even go as far as using the fuel's injection to cool combustion and decrease knock in the combustion cycle of the engine...sometimes this can lead to a richer AFR (more fuel in exhaust gases) which causes pollution.
GDI cars have the capability of going extremely lean under highway speeds to drastically increase mpg and decrease emissions. This is the beauty of GDI.
"The most surprising thing we found was how broad the range of emissions was," says Evans. "As we looked at the exhaust coming out of individual vehicles, we saw so many variations. How you drive, hard acceleration, age of the vehicle, how the car is maintained – these are things we can influence that can all have an effect on pollution."
Not sure how they can tell "how a car is maintained" or "how you drive" from spot checking 100K with a roadside probe... anyone have thoughts?
Modern cars don't need routine "tune-ups." Yes, if a sensor fails or something like that it can cause an emissions problem, but a properly working engine computer tunes itself, and if it detects anything isn't what it should be, it activates the "check engine" light on the dashboard.
I read this article a few years ago, and following article illustrates the point very well.
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.
There are loopholes, though. There are fair number of trucks in my state that are allowed to run dirty diesel trucks with basically no exhaust protections. Their industries (construction? mining?) get some exemptions under the law, I assume. It's utterly stupid, as those trucks probably account for more particulate emissions than all the other vehicles on the road put together. But God forbid someone increase their "cost of doing business" by requiring some improvements.
25 percent of Automobiles Cause 90 Percent of [Automobile] Air Pollution.
I've been all over the planet, and I have yet to see trucks which emit thick black smoke straight from the engine (no exhaust system) like the ones Russia and other ex soviet states are absolutely chock full of.
Edit: Also, only place on earth I've ever seen a petrol pump with the choices of 60, 80, or 85 octane fuel. Pinkpinkpinkpinkpink.
If youv'e ever seen a pump with diesel, you've seen a pump with 15-25 octane [1]. Also, I wouldnt confuse octane with energy content -- pure ethanol has an octane rating of 100+, despite having lower energy density than pure gasoline [2].
My point was rather that they require fuels with such incredibly low octane ratings due to the astonishingly crap compression ratios on ladas, volgas, and yaz trucks, and most soviet technology. The point was that they could run on near-as-damnit bunker oil, watered down with expensive petrol.
Because these vehicles are still in use, they produce an extraordinary amount of pollution, as the low temperature burning that occurs in them results in a crap-tonne of soot.
Same kinda deal with diesels, but again, their diesels will literally run on bunker oil, and you wouldn't believe the incredible clouds of crap that spew forth from them - particularly when they have no exhaust system.
>Researchers at the University of Toronto looked at 100,000 cars as they drove past air sampling probes on one of Toronto’s major roads.