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25 Percent of Cars Cause 90 Percent of Air Pollution
HughPickens.com writes: Sara Novak reports that according to a recent study, "badly tuned" cars and trucks make up one quarter of the vehicles on the road, but cause 95 percent of black carbon, also known as soot, 93 percent of carbon monoxide, and 76 percent of volatile organic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. "The most surprising thing we found was how broad the range of emissions was," says Greg 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." 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. An automated identification and integration method was applied to high time resolution air pollutant measurements of in-use vehicle emissions performed under real-world conditions at a near-road monitoring station in Toronto, Canada during four seasons, through month-long campaigns in 2013–2014. Based on carbon dioxide measurements, over 100 000 vehicle-related plumes were automatically identified and fuel-based emission factors for nitrogen oxides; carbon monoxide; particle number, black carbon; benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX); and methanol were determined for each plume. Evans and his team found that policy changes need to better target cars that are causing the majority of the air pollution. "The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling," says Evans. "Because they are over 1,000 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."
90% is as long as you don't count CO2 I guess?
If 25% of cars produce 90% of air pollution, does that mean 100% of cars cause 360% of air pollution?
... when the most populated countries have probably the highest percentage of badly tuned cars?
We share the same atmosphere.
"The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling" .... well, now we know why small cars are bad
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Cue the next massive-fail version of a government program.
Hell, many of them probably wish they could afford to repair or replace the jalopies...sigh, fucking poor people are killing us again.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If the car was too much of a POS, you couldn't get the credit.
So all they did was take a bunch of relatively clean cars off the road, but left the dirty ones.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's the old pieces of junk falling to pieces that lower class insist on driving when they could simply use public transportation.
Newer cars must adhere to stricter emission standards.
Mod me down if you must, but you know it's true.
Every year or two we undergo emissions inspections - they use a sensor to measure what is in the exhaust gas, and if things are outside of the required limits, you have to fix it. In addition, they use the OBDII port to see if there are any codes being thrown by the engine, and if there are you have to fix those as well.
Older cars were grandfathered in, and only need to pass whatever the standards were at the time they were manufactured.
New cars sold in America are amazingly clean. In some cities the air coming out of the tail pipe is cleaner than the air going in.
OLD cars, especially those owned by poor old men, can be terrible. When I come upon a blue cloud on the highway, it is invariably an ancient truck driven by an ancient man. (frequently Mexican farm worker)
Do we have the political WILL to take that vehicle off the road? or do we pass legislation to make the really clean cars even cleaner? (middle class tax)
Or do we make the Tax PAYERS repair the vehicles of the Poor? There are more of them, and that means more votes.
If you are reading this, you likely have a job. So whip out your wallet and get ready to pay.
Tuning is indeed important - as is balancing wheels; two fairly inexpensive steps you can take to get better efficiency out of your car.
But when I tried to look in the first-linked article for tuning.. I couldn't. It was stuck. I tried to click on the link for the study - I couldn't. It was stuck. I figured I'd wait it out.. that was a long wait.
By the time I could finally click the link for 'the study' (which is the 3rd link in TFS, for what it's worth, so just skip to that one), this is what the console showed:
http://i.imgur.com/n3wHVSC.png
That's 1,114 requests, 10.4MB transferred, taking 1.2 minutes. That's with ad blocking, without script blocking.
'ecosalon' should look in the mirror and consider how much energy is being wasted just by people loading that page - the useful content of which ultimately comes down to 10 small paragraphs of text.
It's always been like this. The focus on making new cars cleaner has always had small returns since you are simply making the cars that produce 10% of the pollution better and if you convert them all to "magic pixie dust fuel", you will still be left with the 90% from the broken cars. Previous studies have also shown that the pattern of which 25% isn't obvious. It isn't a simple rule like "old cars produce more NOx". Even a nearly new car can become a polluter without the owner noticing. Fortunately, the solution is both obvious and simple; do a tailpipe emissions test at they yearly inspection.
Nukular powered cars!
As an RX8 owner, I'm probably responsible for at least half that total.
With the catalyst gone out the tailpipe it smells like a refinery fire going up the road. A very fast refinery fire.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
Start cleaning up with them
Around here, almost all the soot can be attributed to folks who enjoy "rolling coal." -- particularly in close proximity to fuel-efficeint autos and bicycles.
Effectively you'll be targeting the poorest people in your country, since they're the ones most likely to own older, less well-maintained cars.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
and does not let you back on the road if the values are bad.
And let people buy SUVs and dirty low mpg trucks.
Yes, the program should have been for 100% electric cars or plug-in hybrids that could go 20-30 miles on EV mode.
Because every state pretty much requires and emissions test annually or bi-annually. It involves plugging a reader into the OBD-II port and downloading any condition codes, and then the standard tailpipe sniff.
What makes it so gross polluters are still out there is because after failing said emissions check, a waiver can be obtained.
If the car was too much of a POS, you couldn't get the credit.
So all they did was take a bunch of relatively clean cars off the road, but left the dirty ones.
Cash for clunkers wasn't about pollution. It was about bailing out auto companies. Both initially by the government subsidizing the purchase and later by removing late model vehicles from the used car market causing used cars to increase in price to a point where new cars were seen as an attractive option.
Ironically, the upper middle class would have purchased new vehicles anyway, but the lower middle class and the poor were priced out of the "good" used car market and had to stick with what they had or replace it with somebody else's clunker.
Cash for clunkers is a prime example of unintended consequences of a government program when quick fixes are implemented without looking at the long term effect.
So they discovered the Pareto Principle? Brilliant.
This study was only done in Toronto, Canada so take it with a heap of salt.
A 1/4" layer of black soot covering the back bumper.
I see a lot of chipped up Diesels pukeing blackness.
A lot of Eco friendly BIO-Diesel fueled are difficult to drive behind and show significant amounts of blue smoke.
Lets sniff a TriMet short bus, the big ones must have cats on them. The small ones are really bad.
Rick B.
If the car was too much of a POS, you couldn't get the credit.
So all they did was take a bunch of relatively clean cars off the road, but left the dirty ones.
And raised the price of used cars in general by absurd amounts after taking so many out of circulation.
And then you have the small subset of people that believe it makes sense to protest emissions regulations by having a switch that makes their diesel run super-rich and throw plumes of thick smoke out the tailpipe.
But then the cops are waiting for you to do that so they can ticket you for speeding. Heaven forbid using that build-up of speed to go over the next hill while saving gas and reducing emissions.
The problem of carbon emissions is caused by "the death by a thousand cuts".
still works
A very important word was left out of the summary and the article title. Air pollution from transportation still only makes up 25-50% of total anthropogenic air pollution (and that's total transportation, including planes, trucks, and boats). Big chunks come from electricity generation, other industrial processes, and agriculture. So, no, it's not the poor people that are killing us.
Up next on the news US Congress votes that pollution from cars is not a man made phenomenon, but part of a natural cycle..
When I was just out of college and broke I had a car that was clean and was reliable.
When our state began emissions inspections my car failed and I was required to fix it. The repair estimate was $400 (in 1992) and I didn't have $400 to fix my car, so I had to stop driving it.
I was lucky that of the two part-time jobs I had to make ends meet, one agreed to change the store I worked at to a location within reasonable walking distance AND the hours I worked to accommodate the bus trip I now I had to make every day to my other job (I rode the bus on days I only worked that job anyway).
For a lot of people, though, they just don't make enough money to afford these kinds of repairs and they NEED a car to get to work or school or childcare or whatever their responsibilities are.
Mandating this kind of fine-tuning sounds like a great idea, but it ultimately becomes another punitive burden on low-income people. If I wasn't lucky enough to have the alternatives I had, I would have been out of a job or forced to drive illegally.
That this would be a new idea surprises me. In 2009, the US had the Car Allowance Rebate System (aka Cash for Clunkers) program which likely helped reduce emissions even it was more of an economic program. Further back, twenty years ago Ventura County offered money to get old clunkers off the road strictly for emissions reasons. In 1995 per the article I link below, "More than 50% of the smog comes from vehicle emissions and a large percentage of that comes from older, pre-1974 clunkers." If you look at the distribution of cars, many are late model, well-maintained, and operating at or very near their peak. But as cars age and lose value, newer cars are built to higher emissions (and safety) standards, the parts get worn, routine maintenance gets done but many repairs aren't done because it isn't worth it based on the value of the vehicle. In areas without emissions testing, there is absolutely zero incentive to worry about it with an older vehicle. I realize this every time I get behind a vehicle that is smoking or burns my eyes because it is in such bad shape. This is not even about zero or low emissions, it is simply about getting extreme polluters off the road.
Bottom line: Encourage people to replace clunkers and keep their vehicle well-maintained.
As an odd aside, there are articles that show a similar distribution of costs in emergency room. A small number of patients dominate ER costs in the US because they have no insurance and chronic conditions. Google that one for yourself.
Ventura County Reference: http://articles.latimes.com/19...
At least in Ontario (where this study was conducted), every car is required to be clean tested every 2 years. Which is a stupid cash grab really, as my 2002 tests just as good now as it ever did. It is the *really* old cars that are likely a problem. However I bet there are exemptions out there for classic cars etc...
What I would like to see measured, is how much of this is not personal transportation, but rather commercial trucks... Everything is delivered by truck now. I bet they are by far the worst offenders. They also probably have exemptions. Perhaps it is time to start thinking a little less about how some soccer mom gets her kids to school VS what is the best way to deliver goods in our society.
US is worse than many developing nations when it comes to public transportation.
There is no way most people can depend on public transportation in US for regular commute. The frequency, and reach of buses/trains are incredibly poor in most of US. The exceptions are the few big cities - NYC, Chicago, Portland etc., that too if you live in an area close to a station.
Not even Bay Area - a high populated urban area - you can depend on public transportation for daily commute unless you have an option for point to point travel on BART / bus. Try going from Hayward to San Mateo - 25 minutes if you drive, more than an hour if you take a bus. You only have to cross a bridge!!!
The same with many East coast neighborhoods - try Phoenixville PA to Philadelphia on a SEPTA bus.
It sucks to be poor. But in 2015, its better to be poor in a country like India compared to US as poor as a voting block is better represented and their needs better taken care of...and that includes public transportation.
To get a better perspective on what it means to be poor in United States this book is a good beginning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed
Tat Tvam Asi
I would gladly trade my "dirty low mpg truck" for the first awd $30k electric vehicle that can seat 4 ppl and still tow my trailer + bobcat (~8000 lbs)
Unfortunately, Dihydrogen Monoxide is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It's also a major byproduct of burning fossil fuels.
Trees also like Carbon Dioxide.
So, I have come to the conclusion that the Trees are out to get us!
Except where they clarify in the article's lede, the title, summary, and article makes it sound like these 25% of vehicles cause 90% of the air pollution on the entire planet. Let's not forget that the millions of cars on the road are nothing compared to large factories or even a small fleet of cargo ships.
Certainly let's do something about those old cars, but that's not the real problem.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
That seems to clash with the stat that 11 cargo shipping container super ships cause more air pollution than all the cars in the entire US.
My state has emissions testing up to 25 years for a car. But when I open my vents and smell fumes, it's because of all the trucks and vans that are exempt because they are commercial vehicles. And they all have big engines that guzzle gas or diesel resulting in emissions that would make my old car a joke even if it didn't have any working emissions.
That's pro-business government for you. Businesses lobby for special treatment because they have entitlement issues.
Yep if you were going to do it there should have been some kind of mpg update required. Maybe if your new car is 15mpg better you could get the full book value of your used in the swap and then go down from there..
25% that accounts for all the idiots in the big lifted pickup trucks belching black smoke.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So all they did was take a bunch of relatively clean cars off the road, but left the dirty ones.
I strongly disagree. Look at a summary of the stats to see that the most-traded vehicles were light trucks. We're talking about a bunch of sloppy old pickup trucks with little or no emissions controls, usually literally nothing but one O2 sensor, an EGR, a PCV, and a catalyst. But modern light trucks have the same kinds of emissions controls as cars, even though the standards aren't as strict, so they do have much lower emissions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's easy to meet EPA standards on test bench. Out in the real world it becomes a lot harder. Heavy acceleration is bound to dump all kinds of particulates, NOx, and CO, despite pollution controls like catalytic converters. Things like catalytic converters and other pollution controls run best under constant conditions, with the proper amount of fuel to air, temperature, etc. All of which probably works well while cruising at constant speed down the open road. The moment you start doing stop and go, all bets are off. Hit the gas pedal hard and the fuel mixture goes fairly rich as the engine tries to keep up. I'm not a hypermiler freak, but I do tend to accelerate and brake conservatively (I have a CDL and drive big trucks occasionally as well, which influences my habits) which seems to anger people in city driving, unfortunately. I also try to take curves in a manner that makes things as smooth as possible.
Most people on the road seem to not care one bit about fuel consumption and race from light to light, without actually getting ahead of anyone doing that, nor actually getting anywhere faster. I'm sure emissions could be curtailed quite a bit if everyone just slowed down and cars limited their acceleration to something realistic.
I imagine these horribly-bad 25% of cars emitting the most pollution would do a lot better if people would drive them properly.
Got to hell, you self-indulgent, privileged dick.
The main cause of premature engine wear is oil not being changed as scheduled. I'm not talking about every 3 to 5k miles, I'm talking about people not changing until every 15 to 20! The maintenance light really helped in this regard. It forced drivers to see a nagging light on the dash. The cheapest way to "clear it" is to have the oil changed. Yes, it's trivial to clear it yourself, but for 99.9% of drivers out there, this method need not apply.
Life is not for the lazy.
Like all those hicks that purposely tune their diesels wrong, so they belch back smoke out of the exhaust?
Imagine what would happen if the nanny state spent this kind of effort and money getting the same quality of diagnostics tools into auto tuner's hands, instead of badgering people as they drive down the highway or catching them late, at a test date or what not.
That's before we consider that most pollutants are sourced from powerplants, not cars.
Cars are just not an issue -- EVs are getting popular and older cars fade away fast. Auto emissions were cut massively in the US with the advent of mandatory fuel injection in 1988, 27 years ago. A thirty year old car on the road is getting to be a rarity.
It's also worth considering that while the Democratic Party considers the closing down of a nuclear powerplant in California a huge victory, it also increased Cal's output of CO2 by about 12%. That's huge.
That's why I dislike green people and modern democrats -- they always have some shoddy agenda, and if it's implemented, a slew of negative consequences.
Look at Chernobyl -- to this day, the green hysteria industry claims that hundreds of thousands died because of Chernobyl, but they refuse to disclose the data or methodology. Contrast that with the scientific method -- two fully open studies show about 80 people dead from Chernobyl, mostly from improper treatment.
80 people dead is bad and tragic, but it's also about the same count as black-on-black thug crime over a four week period in the US.
are exempt from CAFE standards because of their supposed utility.
This has made a huge loophole that the auto makers abuse by promoting their trucks & SUV's above all else.
We can solve this problem by mandating that everything thats exempt from CAFE require a CDL.
I doubt the soccer moms will bother getting a CDL just so they can get a jeep over a minivan. And if they do... good for them at least they'll get some training on how to handle large vehicles. Everybodys safer.
Those fine particles spewed out from truck exhausts in those bullies crawling uphill going in your lungs - not an issue at all - that would go against the contractually granted right in the TPP for Chinese truck manufacturers to make profit.
The poorer you are, the less likely you are to be able to afford to live close to work.
Not every place is like San Francisco where there is a strong correlation between longer commute length and affordable housing. It varies quite a lot by municipality regarding how far your commute might be.
Got to hell, you self-indulgent, privileged dick.
FYI: Truck+trailer+bobcat sounds like he does construction work.
When I was just out of college and broke I had a car that was clean and was reliable. When our state began emissions inspections my car failed and I was required to fix it.
Then while it may have been reliable it was by definition not a clean (emissions) car.
For a lot of people, though, they just don't make enough money to afford these kinds of repairs and they NEED a car to get to work or school or childcare or whatever their responsibilities are.
This is true and it is a real problem. The appropriate solution would be for the government to incorporate some form of need based financial assistance for those individuals unduly burdened by the program. Shamefully some state governments appear to not do this.
New cars sold in America are amazingly clean. In some cities the air coming out of the tail pipe is cleaner than the air going in.
Even if that were true (and it isn't really - more on that below) that speaks more to how dirty the incoming air is than to how clean the cars are. Would you breath the air from any car tailpipe? Of course you wouldn't, no matter how clean they claim it to be.
You are not accounting for carbon dioxide emissions because I assure you that more CO2 comes out than goes in and no gasoline or diesel engine cleans that up. Even if the car cleans up the particulate matter nearly perfectly it still emits huge amounts of CO2 and other gases which is still a problem. Cars are a lot cleaner than they used to be but lets not pretend internal combustion engines are anything remotely resembling pollutant free.
CO2 is not a pollutant but a greenhouse gas.
CO2 is a pollutant AND a greenhouse gas. It is both. The source of the CO2 is from an artificial source and the quantity is FAR beyond what the evidence shows us can be absorbed in a reasonable time by the natural means.
Otherwise you're making an argument that every time you exhale, you're polluting the air.
We are evolved part of a natural ecosystem. The emissions from a car are not. Every bit of CO2 emitted from cars into the atmosphere is a pollutant because it would not be there otherwise. Anything can be a pollutant if it is put somewhere it would not otherwise be to the detriment of the environment. Water can be a pollutant under the right circumstances.
This car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Of course global warning is a major problem. But it's not a problem of pollution, it's a problem of global warming.
That's a tautology if I've ever heard one. Global warming isn't the only problem caused by pollution but global warming IS caused by pollution. This is true even if you ignore whether the source is human or natural. And yes CO2 can be (and is) a form of pollution. It's not particulate matter like soot but it's still pollution.
I don't see anywhere on your linked page indicating the age of the vehicles. Trading in a 10 year old truck for a new truck doesn't help significantly. Trading a 30 year old truck would help (and there are plenty of those on the road still spewing fumes).
This space intentionally left blank
it let you trade in your car for a huge tax break. Often more than the vehicle was worth. But to do that you had to be able to afford to buy a new car from a dealer. What ended up happening was poor people kept their high pollution clunkers while the upper middle class traded in their 4-5 year old cars for new ones. The law specified that cars & trucks traded in had to be destroyed (since the point was to get polluters off the road). So what you had was a bunch of modern, zero emission cars & trucks being trashed while the poor were busy hacking their stuff from the late 80s early 90s together to keep it running. Meanwhile it had the added benefit of massively raising the price of used cars (since several million left the supply chain as junk) further encouraging the poor to keep their clunkers. It was an unmitigated disaster that we're only just now recovering from.
I've got a 17 year old kid I'm buying a car for and this damn program is gonna add $2k to the cost of it, so I'm more than a little bitter. Gotta have a car though, the bus trip from our apartment to the college is 90 minutes one way. Good luck making it through a rigorous course load with 3 hours out of your day every day. I suppose if she wanted to be a philosophy major...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
it works great for that tire inflation light too.
I drive two trucks that were both brand new in 2013. One of them is a Freightliner Cascadia, the other a Ford F150 with the 5.0 "coyote" engine.
The Freightliner has almost 400,000 miles on the clock now, while the Ford has a mere 25,000. The inside of the stack on the Freightliner is still as silver and shiny as the day it was new. The inside of the tailpipes on the Ford have been black since about day two of operation.
With all the advances in gasoline engines, and all the technology in this 5.0 I'm driving, I was really surprised by how comparatively dirty it is. Considering the days when my trailers used to have a black streak running their whole length, I never expected a diesel to be radically cleaner than a gasoline engine. The key to the whole thing is the diesel particulate filter, and it obviously works very well.
We're talking about a bunch of sloppy old pickup trucks with little or no emissions controls, usually literally nothing but one O2 sensor, an EGR, a PCV, and a catalyst.
I develop vehicle emissions system for a living. An O2 sensor and a catalyst will get rid of the vast majority of emissions from a spark ignited vehicle. Little or no emissions controls would mean 1970s era cars. Think carburetor and no catalytic convertor.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
This isn't new, I've read articles on it (in California) over 20 years ago. Inspections work when a large percentage of your cars are emitting an excessive amount of pollutants. But as that percentage decreases, you end up wasting huge amounts of money.
Say an inspection costs $25 and 1 in 10 cars is not in compliance. You're basically paying $250 to detect each polluting car and require it be fixed. That's probably a worthwhile tradeoff.
Now fast-forward. After decades of inspections have successfully weeded out the worst-polluting cars, only 1 in say 1,000 cars is not in compliance. You're now siphoning $25,000 out of the economy to detect each polluting car. There's no way that's worth it.
California is pretty much already in that second state. 20 years ago the companies that make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more financially sensible solution. Stop the inspections or reduce them to random lottery inspections which would hit each car on average every 10 years - the vast majority of cars are already clean enough and there's little to be gained from annual or bi-annual inspections. Instead, place detection equipment like used in TFA on places where cars pass by single-file, like freeway on-ramps. This equipment would automatically measure the emissions of each passing car (or truck), and if a particular car was dirty it would snap a photo of the license plate. If a car was flagged repeatedly at multiple stations, the State could then issue the owner a notice requiring him to fix it.
But the idea never got anywhere because the auto repair shops lobbied heavily against it. See, these inspections have become a billion dollar business, and they didn't want to lose that money. One person wasting money is another person making easy money.
Annual vehicle emissions tests. Cars and other vehicles that pollute are either fixed or removed from the road. Many countries have safety tests already and some include emissions testing as part of that. In a country like the US this should be a federal mandate to stop one state shirking its responsibilities.
The 25% of old cars don't use catalytic converters. That's common in most 3rd world and EU countries....
Retrofit and call it a day.
Trading a 30 year old truck would help (and there are plenty of those on the road still spewing fumes).
OMFGWTFBBQ even Wikipedia knows the program reduced emissions. You weren't even allowed to trade in a car older than 25 years, because the wrecking yards didn't want them. They had to destroy the engines, but nothing else. And they destroyed them by replacing the oil with something horrible, I forget what it was, so anything else was still fine including the complete fuel system of the vehicle, so they were worth more than their scrap value. Also, those vehicles are a tiny minority of what's on the road. The average age of a car in the US is a little over 11 years right now, which is an all-time record high but still a whole lot less than 25.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look you could reduce the pollution from cars to 0 tomorrow and the CO2 emmissions to nothing and you would not put a dent in the CO2 and pollution we produce as humans. Look we can all SEE cars , and diesel trucks and think look at all that stuff it just put in the air. The fact of the matter is one large tanker ship is equal in pollution output as 1 million cars. 1 ship : 1 million cars
the 80's got us looking at the wrong thing and our heads are still stuck looking at the things we can see.
http://www.gizmag.com/shipping...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
If we docked seven or eight cruise ships or super tankers that would stop more pollution that all the autos in the US cause. How much pollution does burning coal amount to? Yes, beat up cars pollute more than newer, better cars. But even the elimination of all cars will not get us to where we need to be in regard to pollution.
CO2 emissions are proportional to fuel consumption, so I guess there's no point measuring that figure; the fuel efficiency of vehicles is a known quantity.
But are these vehicule really causing 90% of the pollution? Maybe it's only 35% when you count CO2 who knows?
Ontario Policy is what is causing the pollution. I have heard (but to be fair, have not checked) that you can continue using your vehicle there for decades after it fails emissions tests so long as you don't sell it to someone new. This results in a lot of polluting cars on the road, particularly among people who can't really afford to replace them. A combination of a cash-for-clunkers type program and opening their markets to make it easy to import cars from the states would go a long way toward reducing the air pollution.
There is a box truck that delivers mail to the postal facility on Westgate rd/Floretta Place in Raleigh, NC everyday around 4pm. No license plate, and the entire truck is black from soot and thick plumes of smoke follow it wherever it goes. How do I get this asshole shutdown? Same thing everyday for at least 8 months, probably years.
Nice that Explorer 4WD was the most traded in but mine was too much of a clunker (or simply too old, WTF?)...so they didn't want me to upgrade apparently. Good thing logic is not required of Congresscritters. And they eliminated most of the used ones I could have replaced it with in the process. A few years later I replaced with another SUV that actually gets WORSE mileage because I can't justify the several thousand dollar differnce for a more economical one.
An O2 sensor and a catalyst will get rid of the vast majority of emissions from a spark ignited vehicle.
They don't even have catalyst monitoring on those old vehicles, and most of them don't have heated sensors so their cold start emissions are abysmal. Virtually none of them have variable intakes or any other even basic trickery. As you ought to know, there's a whole lot of room for improvement beyond the pickups of the 90s. A lot of them didn't even get SFI until this millenium.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stop using oil power and Switch to sail
We can address the rising water problem by building canals all through the US and using the dug up dirt to raise the elevation of the existing land.
Sell your car to the oil lovers and get a sailboat or build your own.
http://free-boat.com
I thought I saw a program that they did this in Colorado, or some other state. The point was it was easier and cheaper to monitor passing traffic and have the state pay to fix the cars that were the major poluters than have everyone go through an emissions check every year - or something like that. And I remember is was more like 10% of the cars caused 90% of the polution.
This is why California has had some fairly onerous smog check laws to get older cars off the roads...
this seems to concentrate on exhaust emissions. But a 60s car emits more pollution just sitting there than a modern does running; modern cars trap evaporation from the gas tank, and are built with plastics that emit less in the way of hydrocarbons as well.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
An increase in the CO2 emission would be great. That means that the car is processing the fuel efficiently. What you don't want is all the other nasty chemicals. I remember acid rain due to sulphur in diesel fuel. It turned all my trees at the cottage brown. Yucky stuff. Ontario has a drive clean program that tests older cars for excess pollution. Nowadays the cars a better built and no longer need fixing after testing. Toluene and Xylenes are very toxic and cause cancer. We use a lot of salt on our roads. In the spring time there is a lot of salt dust in the air and it covers the inside of the car with white powder.