This is just insane. Not only are cars themself mostly unnecessary, if the right infrastructure is provided, but SUVs also use more resources to run and be produced then small cars, without any advantage over them. So an obvious waste, which could easily be cut to reduce emissions.
Source IEA: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/suvs-are-setting-new-sales-records-each-year-and-so-are-their-emissions
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding this but weren’t the SUVs already calculated in the countries’ bars? Of course something globally combined that burns fuel is going to be significant. I imagine sedans and coupes wouldn’t be very far behind. This smacks of a “Statistically, everyone has one testicle” type of thing.
Are we just picking out things that we can add to the graph? Like, can I choose farts or barbques?
Can we show the emissions from industries like plastics?
This.
Not for the sake of being green… but for the fact that plastic is a endocrine disruptor, we’re phasing out all things plastic for glass as best we can.
Fk plastic.
This is such a difficult thing to do. Replaced baggies with reusable silicone. Use only glass or ceramic dishes. Use reusable bags at the grocery store. Got little reusable fruit and vegetable bags so I’m not using the disposable bags at the grocery.
But at the end of the day, goddamn every food or product I buy comes wrapped in plastic one way or the other, and there’s little I can do about that.
Agreed. I’d love to also see how this was calculated, but the graph doesn’t make me want to click on the link tbh.
My (and hopefully most other’s too) hatred for SUV’s is already maxxed out anyway.
*Edit: ok, my curiosity won and I clicked it and saw that it was done by IEA… Literally one of my favourite organisations that don’t tend to come up with junk data or conclusions. It’s a good read.
Say you remove SUVs from the other countries’ calculations. That would make SUVs look even worse.
Or perhaps you begin arbitrarily counting other things twice in your calculations. Then they look better.
My point isn’t that item X doesn’t pollute, just that the graph in question is less useful in it’s nature and aimed at being alarmist.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding this but weren’t the SUVs already calculated in the countries’ bars?
I was responding to this comment. If you remove the SUVs’ calculations from other bars then the others get smaller relative to SUVs and make SUVs look worse.
Or perhaps you begin arbitrarily counting other things twice in your calculations. Then they look better.
They either kept SUVs in or they didn’t. If they kept them in (counted twice) It makes SUVs look less polluting (see above). If they didn’t count them twice then it would be more accurate and make SUVs look more polluting.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether they counted SUVs twice or not because it doesnt make their calculations “look better”.
I don’t see it as alarmist at all. Rather, it’s demonstrating how much emissions come from SUVs. As seen by other comments on this post, it sparks dialogue about less carbon intensive alternatives to SUVs which are exceedingly common.
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Good point. I wonder how big of a bar “meat production” would be. If you include shipping and all other ways it contributes to emissions I wouldn’t be surprised if it outweighs consumer vehicles.
That would be my uneducated guess as well. Taking everything like processing, shipping, storing, growing the feed and all it requires into account for meat production, I would be shocked if it weren’t higher than passenger vehicles combined.
That’s kind of the point. People naturally imagine that there are much greater contributions and that there’s no way a minor choice like an SUV over a compact has major consequences. But this graph does demonstrate that such a decision matters.
Show cars on the same graph. With and without SUV.
Then include military.
I’m not really into defending SUVs of course, but nor am in into singling them out when the car itself is the tragedy.
Also F1.
And planes.
I don’t own an SUV, but I would . Wrong I know, but in context, not really .
If every SUV was binned tomorrow, and replace with a typical car, that number - reduced by 20% is still awful. And, if Suvs are 20% of all cars. Jesus wept
You could combine all motorsports into one bar and it still wouldn’t register
Cos flying cars around the world is green
If we’re naming modes of transportation that pollute, it would be remiss not to point out the worst one: ships.
On the contrary: ships are the third-best one when you consider greenhouse gas emissions per ton-kilometer of cargo moved, which is the metric that matters. They only pollute a lot as a category because there is so much fucking shipping going on. (Reducing that is also an issue, but one for a different thread.)
The only things better are bicycles and sailboats (because they use no fossil fuels at all). Even trains are less efficient, although in the long run they have the advantage of being possible to electrify and run on renewables.
Granted, the other pollution (not greenhouse gas) from ships is terrible because they use the cheapest, nastiest fuel. But as bad as that is, it’s still a much, much lower-priority concern than climate change.
(TBH, what we really need are nuclear cargo ships.)
That’s honestly a very fair point.
Na, bring back the golden age of sail. Ideally with automation… and automation sea shanties
The biggest problem with your traditional square-rigged ships is that the masts get in the way of modern cargo-handling methods.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the largest sailing ship ever made (SS Great Eastern) had a gross register tonnage of 18,915, while the largest container ship (MSC Irina) has a gross tonnage1 of 233,328. In other words, the sails would have to be an order of magnitude larger than any that have ever been made before.
There are some newer sail technologies, such as rotor sails and kite sails, but those are apparently designed to shave 5-10% off the fuel consumption of a primarily engine-powered ship, not act as the primary means of propulsion.
And the other big problem with any of those technologies is that even if they could propel the ship by themselves, they still can’t fully replace engines because logistics companies won’t tolerate getting becalmed anymore. And even if that weren’t an issue, you’ve still got to have an engine for maneuvering in tight channels and ports anyway.
In order to completely eliminate having to burn fuel, nuclear really is the only option.
(1 GRT and GT aren’t quite the same thing, but there’s no simple conversion between the two. That said, they should “not differ too greatly” according to Wikipedia.)
Oh, I fully agree there are multiple logistics and engineering challenges that would need to be overcome. But im also aware we are orders of magnitude more advanced than when Great Eastern was designed and built - we used to think we would never get to the moon because a spacecraft couldn’t carry enough coal.
If you could eliminate 80% of fuel costs you could make smaller vessels much more cost effective which, let’s be honest, is the biggest hurdle. Make it sail 95% of the time, small maneuvering engine and electric tugs can eliminate alot of the variable costs… and they only cruise at 10-12kt anyway.
If you could eliminate 80% of fuel costs you could make smaller vessels much more cost effective
Ships don’t work that way. There are a couple of reasons other than fuel economy why they keep building them as big as they can:
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Hull speed is proportional to waterline length. In other words, bigger ships can go faster.
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Bigger ships have better economies of scale for the crew.
Also, winds aren’t reliable enough for any ship to sail 95% of the time, unless you count being becalmed as “sailing.”
Yes, theoretical hull speed is proportional to hull speed, but mondern cargo ships aren’t optimized for speed - old school clippers were.
They are also more cost effective for crew - which is why you need to automate as much as possible. Electronic winches, hydraulic booms or sheets, instance access to weather, Electronic monitoring, tides and conditions forecasting and access for a harbour pilot to take over could eliminate alot, if not all of transit crew.
Will it be as fast and reliable- no. But if you can make the cost savings outweigh the drawbacks you can make a presentable business case.
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I don’t understand your logic. Say SUV’s were on average 50 % worse emitters than regular cars. Now when picking a car you face the choice of emitting 1 unit or 1.5 units of emissions, for basically the same service. If we look around, these kinds of choices are everywhere. Transportation, food, housing, electric power. Often the difference is even bigger than 50 %. Being consistent in choosing/forcing/promoting the better alternative results in a HUGE difference. Of course, if you look at one decision, it’s not decisive. But transportation and cars definitely are a major factor.
This is just insane
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/07/un-expert-human-rights-climate-crisis-economy
Outgoing special rapporteur David Boyd says ‘there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand how grave this is’
