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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."
"The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling" .... well, now we know why small cars are bad
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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
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.
Depends how it's implemented. My locality has a 2 year mandatory emissions check for $20 that has reduced these types of pollution by over 1/3.
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. I guess it would have been interesting to have CO2 figures included for comparison with the other numbers though.
CO2 level was actually used to automatically identify the exhast gasses in the study, so maybe they actually had those figures, without reading the full paper it's hard to say. From the abstract;
"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."
Oh no... it's the future.
Probably because the authors of the study were researchers at the University of Toronto and had access to air sampling equipment set up in the area? Sometimes you have to do the research where you can, rather than where you might want to.
(Also, we only share the same atmosphere on average. For, say, an urban area with lots of vehicle traffic, the amount of soot people are inhaling is going to depend very substantially on the vehicles in local use, with much weaker effects from more distant sources.)
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.
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.
Maybe if someone paid them a decent living wage, they could afford a newer, more well-maintained car.
No, no. that's COMMIE talk!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You have to remember that "Cash for Clunkers" was not intended to reduce emissions. It was intended to provide a short-term stimulus to the auto industry. In that regard it worked for a short time, as intended; however, it led to a situation where the auto industry faced low orders after the program ended because people had just "rescheduled" intended purchases.
There was also the problem that the program was rather restrictive and actually disqualified many of the vehicles that should have been removed from the road if emission reduction had been a goal.
CO2 is in a different category than "air pollution" in the sense that "air pollution" causes health problems (directly), while CO2 only causes climate change.
It's also in a different category because the solution to reducing it is different. In theory, it would be possible to eliminate all "air pollution" other than CO2 from an internal-combustion engine exhaust, if you had the right kind of catalytic converter/filter/etc. on it. In contrast, the only way to eliminate CO2 from an internal-combustion engine is to turn it off.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
CO2 is not a pollutant but a greenhouse gas.
Otherwise you're making an argument that every time you exhale, you're polluting the air.
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...
Yep.
And, en-route, invented electronic engine management, catalytic converters and everything else required to meet those targets, which is now all compulsory equipment, standard and included on all cars. Not a bad thing at all.
If you're worried about it, test old cars regularly and take them off the road. If you don't, then you're not worried about it.
Cars, in locales that have emission testing, are only required to meet the emission requirements in place for the year manufactured. This is a good thing, because otherwise, emission standards could be tightened and everybody would be forced to buy a new car. Since older cars have a finite life, the problem of poorly running old cars will eventually resolve itself. When that occurs, the studies will show that overpowered high horse-powered cars and SUVs are the major polluters. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a desire to limit those.
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
A lot was left out of the study. I find their methodology fishy. For example, here's their test area:
Downtown... stop and go for large portions of the day... various driving states... in short, even if two people are driving the exact same car in the exact same condition in the exact same driving style on average, if one at the particular moment of passing the sensor happens to be letting off the gas, while the other just happens to be accelerating when it passes the sensor, the two cars are going to give wildly different pollution readings.
I'll also note that the paper says that it's still in review, aka it hasn't passed peer-review yet.
I'm sure the general premise is right, that small numbers of vehicles cause most pollution. But I think their experimental setup is pretty bad. The stupid thing is they're collecting the data they'd need to control for it - they're taking pictures, which would let them tie vehicle plumes to particular license plate numbers, and then only study vehicles that pass by the sensor a number of times times to that they can get a running average. Another way to control for it would be to have a dozen or so sensors spaced out down the road spaced well apart so that they can average a particular vehicle's emissions on a single drive down the road. But a single sensor, single pass way to rate a vehicle's emissions as good or bad? That's a terrible approach. And they stretch very far on their conclusions based on this approach.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
And the several percent of non-vegans who travel by bicycle instead of cars are acting all smug thinking they're saving the planet, when their consumption of meat for the calories they burn gives them the per-kilometer carbon footprint of an SUV. Plus an order-of-magnitude higher per-kilometer risk of death or serious injury than a person in a car.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
But this is 90/25. It violates the rule! My conclusion is the findings are erroneous, they have violated the 80/20 rule, first proposed by Albert Einstein.
Concerning such pollutants, we actually don't share the same atmosphere. These sort of pollutants have short atmospheric residence periods, they're mainly problems at or near the point of emission (the particular distance that they pose a problem for depends on the type of pollutant).
It's one of the reasons that even if electric cars didn't cut down in pollution (which studies repeatedly show that they do) and simply moved the same amount of pollution from the streets to the top of power plant smokestacks, they'd still improve public health on average. Any pollutants you do emit, you want them as far as possible away from where most people are (aka, away from areas with lots of traffic, aka, lots of people), and as high up as possible.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
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.
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?
Some of the listed pollutants are the results of incomplete combustion. It's worthwhile to include CO2, since there's a very good chance that the offending vehicles may therefore be releasing less waste in CO2 form.
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.
I guess that it makes sense for a Canadian University to conduct experiments in Canada.
The team suggested the Bahamas but for some reason, it was rejected.
Water vapor also has a mean atmospheric residence time of 2 to 20 days. You do something to completely throw water vapor levels off balance, it'll be back to where it was a few weeks later. It can only function as a feedback mechanism; water vapor is limited to fluctuating around a mean. What that mean is depends on the other driving factors in the environment. These are known as forcing. For something to act as forcing, it has to have far longer residence times.
(Note that while on human timescales carbon dioxide is forcing, on geological timescales it's mere feedback. A couple hundred years is nothing compared to, say, Milankovitch cycles)
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
Unfortunately, Dihydrogen Monoxide is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It's also a major byproduct of burning fossil fuels.
Dihydrogen Monoxide combined with Carbon Dioxide create Carbonated Dihydrogen Monoxide that can cause severe eructation (warning: the video contains SEVERE ERUCTATIONS).
Trees also like Carbon Dioxide.
So, I have come to the conclusion that the Trees are out to get us!
Before you blame the trees, blame the tree lovers!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
While I can't dispute the smug factor, is it your hypothesis that bicyclists eat more meat than car drivers?
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.
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.
The problem is not the comparative amount of CO2 that humans are producing, it's that the ecological carbon cycle is not well equipped to deal with changes in the the total amount of carbon present - that normally only varies on geological timescales, as carbon normally only flows into/out of geological stockpiles *very* slowly (and usually in a fairly balanced manner, so that there is only a tiny net change). Burning fossil fuel is the exception - we're releasing geological carbon into the atmosphere much faster than all other geological processes combined (I can't clearly remember the numbers, but I think we exceed global volcanic activity by 10-20x)
Basically, on a human timescale there are three major "pools" that carbon gets cycled between - the ocean, the atmosphere, and biomass. When we burn fossil fuels we introduce new carbon that hasn't been part of the cycle since before anything resembling humanity existed, and that carbon has to go somewhere. Now if we could get biomass levels to increase in line with fossil fuel emissions we'd be set - but planetary biomass levels seem to actually be falling, which leaves the ocean and atmosphere. CO2 levels in the oceans are climbing - aka ocean acidification, and it's beginning to have devastating effects. Meanwhile the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been climbing at roughly 60-70% of the rate we're emitting the stuff for as long as we've been measuring it - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to make the connection that we're probably dumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than the ecosystem can deal with it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Exactly. CO2 emissions are not themselves the problem. That they're coming from fossil fuels is the problem. If cars all burned ethanol or bio-diesel it would be a non-issue. Well, I suppose they'd still contribute tot he heat-island effect around cities, but that's a much smaller and not always unwelcome side effect. It's only because we're pumping geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, completely unbalancing the geological carbon cycle, that we have a problem.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It is not helpful to be that general about the issue. The problem of air pollution has different causes and different effects than the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
A pollutant is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource. Too much CO2 has undesired effects, but is already part of the environment. That's like saying water is a pollutant if there is so much of it introduced that you get an overflow. Sure, it's a problem, but that doesn't make water an environmental pollutant.
No one is underestimating the problem of CO2 by not labeling it as a "pollutant". Let's resist the urge to associate separate issues with words that have more specific meanings just because we want to use the negative connotation of the term to affirm our estimation of the seriousness of the problem.
My mistake - just looked it up again and apparently human CO2 emissios are 100x greater than the most generous estimates of volcanic emissions. I knew that number felt wrong.
Also, here's a nice image showing the carbon cycle in a bit more detail.
http://essayweb.net/geology/qu...
Notice that it shows carbon flow in both directions - so for example every year vegetation sucks 121.3Gt of carbon out of the atmosphere while releasing 60 Gt back directly, and a further 60GT back from the soil (decomposition, presumably) - for a net flow of 1.3Gt out of the atmosphere.
The ocean similarly cycles 92Gt out of the atmosphere while returning 90Gt back, for a net flow of 2Gt
(And there, at the very bottom, there's sediment - the long-term geological sequestration of carbon at 0.2Gt per year.)
Meanwhile human emissions release 5.5Gt of carbon per year - two thirds more than is removed by vegetation and oceans, to say nothing of the 0.2Gt rate at which it gets geologically sequestered again.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They burn more calories (that's where the energy for propulsion comes from). Calories come from food. If meat is part of their diet, then yes, they eat more meat. Which has a huge CO2 footprint associated with it. Vegetables too have often very high CO2 footprints per calorie (because they have so few calories). As does anything shipped in from long distances away.
A cyclist can maintain a low CO2 footprint, but only by eating a diet that has low CO2 emissions per calorie - for example, locally grown grains, potatoes, etc.
Now, an electric bicycle is a different story; they have incredibly low CO2 footprints.
(It's not just a stereotype that athletes eat big meals after a big game or hard workout. They have to to not lose weight to the point that they lose energy and their body starts to eat itself. While a disturbing number of people seem to have this notion that exercise is "free energy", it's simply not the reality. Yes, a person being fit and thin by exercising regularly will have a somewhat lower baseline metabolism. But it's not even close to the number of calories they burn to get there.)
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
No, the mercury itself is the problem - it's a nasty toxin no matter where it's coming from.
CO2 on the other hand is harmless in normal concentrations, and in fact is absolutely vital to the healthy functioning of our ecology. The only problem with it is that we're producing it from sources where the carbon would normally remain sequestered for many, many more millions of years, and in the process disrupting the thermal equilibrium of the planet, threatening to push it past the tipping point to the other bistable extreme of a radically warmer world.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You need some new motorhead friends. They are referring to 80s cars.
It's different now. You just can't remove the emission control, they aren't just add-ons anymore.
Pulling out the fuel injection and bolting on a carb will cost you power.
Also OBD2 scanners are $12 today.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Every bit of CO2 emitted from cars into the atmosphere is a pollutant because it would not be there otherwise.
The extremity of that view is why it is wrong.
Cars can absolutely be run on chemical carbon fuel sources that are derived from the extant carbon cycle. Think biofuel.
Inserting another link in the carbon cycle to extract energy from it for the purpose of doing work is not a bad thing. The problem is that we're sourcing the carbon for the work from outside of the cycle. (Below the soil layer)