By
Guys like Copernicus and Galileo took serious heat for putting science ahead of superstition.
Others took literal heat for
the same thing, getting themselves tossed onto the barbecue pit of ignorance.
We don't remember their names because, well, they got burned.
The only flame I'll likely suffer from what I'm going to write here might be a smart-ass e-mail from David Suzuki.
Can we get even the most tenuous grasp on the reality of the automobile and the environment?
In the last week alone, I have read three stories that show a breathtaking lack of knowledge on this vital topic.
They also implicitly or explicitly call for governmental action to correct various perceived wrongs.
Listen: you can believe whatever you want. There are plenty of religions to go around.
But if you're going to argue
for regulation that will affect us all, and cost each of us thousands of dollars,
you better have at least a passing acquaintance with the facts.
For example, the Star related the tale of Carol and Terry James.
Carol James is asthmatic, and
wants to drive a small electric car because she doesn't want to contribute
any further to
environmental deterioration. The Jameses wonder why the government won't
let her drive one on public roads,
the prohibition based on the fact that these vehicles have the structural
integrity of a wet Kleenex box.
But, their supporters say, the
government allows motorcycles and bicycles on public roads;
why not allow one more death trap?
I must admit there is a certain
logical consistency here, although three wrongs don't necessarily make a right.
What they may not have fully considered is: where is the electricity to
power this vehicle going to come from?
The nuclear generating station in Pickering?
Shall we rebuild the Hearn Generating Station in east Toronto to run on
coal again,
or simply make do with the one in Sarnia?
Now, those plants are hardly poster children for the environmental movement.
Elisabeth Rosenthal, writing
in the International Herald Tribune, asks her readers to consider
the environmental
footprint not of their day-to-day transportation, but of vacation travel.
She quotes Christian Brand of Oxford University
as saying,
"Car travel is very much the dominant factor. Air travel can be big, too.
They count for 90 per cent of personal travel emissions.''
Umm, wait a minute. Rosenthal
is conflating car travel with jet travel to a foreign destination here. As
we shall soon see,
by most reckonings, personal road transportation accounts for about 15 per
cent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
If that plus airline travel is 90 per cent according to Brand, then doesn't
the math make airline travel 75 per cent?
And we're attacking the automobile here?
Still with Jolly Old England,
Ken Livingstone, the greener-than-thou Lord Mayor of London, recently announced
a trebling
of the congestion charge to enter downtown London for gas-guzzling vehicles,
to go into effect October.
This has prompted Porsche to threaten a lawsuit based on discrimination.
Now, I hate Stupid Useless Vehicles
(SUVs) as much or more than anyone, and the Porsche Cayenne is easily among
the most egregious.
But Porsche's executives will
already burn in hell for eternity for slapping their precious badge on such
a ridiculous vehicle,
one that flies in the face of every principle the company's founder stood
for.
But Livingstone's action is feeble-minded political pandering, which is even worse.
I claim to be as green as the next guy who's not named Kermit.
Idling vehicles drive me nuts, which is one (but only one) of the reasons I rail regularly against remote car starters.
I've got four kids, one of whom
is also asthmatic. I want the world they inherit to be better and cleaner
than the one
left by my parents.
Even when I race (I know, call me a hypocrite), I race small, relatively fuel-efficient cars like Minis.
That's partly because I just hate waste. Oh yeah; I'm also cheap.
But pollution? It's simply not an issue.
The three substances the government
controls for in automotive emissions are hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide
(CO),
and oxides of nitrogen (NOx). Modern cars have reduced these by more than
90 per cent in the last 25 years.
Has any other industry – notably the jet aircraft industry – even come close?
Some 15 years ago, Saab demonstrated
that a Saab 9000 with the then-revolutionary Trionic engine, could swallow
the
exhaust of a 1950s two-stroke car (about the worst polluter the car industry
ever produced) and render the resulting exhaust
as pure as the driven snow.
Major progress has been made since. We are really nibbling on the thinnest of margins now.
In virtually any urban environment in the world, the exhaust coming out of a modern car engine is cleaner than the air going in.
Want to do something for urban
air quality? Buy a new gasoline-engined car and drive it around as much as
you can,
vacuuming up all the crap left over from those jet planes and coal-fired
electricity generating stations.
What about the environmental
bogeyman that keeps Al Gore awake at nights, the one emission North American
governments
(B.C. soon to be excepted) do not control for – carbon dioxide (CO2), the
greenhouse gas that threatens to bake us in our
own juices?
To listen to Livingstone and
most of the misguided reduce-your-carbon-footprint ilk, you'd think that if
cars were only banned
tomorrow, we'd breathe easier for evermore.
Do you know what contribution cars and light trucks make to greenhouse gases?
If you were to judge from the stories above, you'd probably guess 99 per cent, or more.
The facts? Depends on which country you're talking about.
In Canada, according to the Environment
Canada website, where you will find the greenest of the green in our federal
bureaucracy,
that number is 12 per cent.
Pardon me, but that doesn't sound
like the carbon-laden sky is falling to me. So if we all stopped driving tomorrow,
the greenhouse
gas situation would be 88 per cent as bad as it is now.
If we all started driving CO2-free
hydrogen-powered cars tomorrow, given that the new-car fleet turns over at
about 8 per cent annually,
we would gain about a 1 per cent improvement – 12 per cent times 8 per cent
– annually. It would take 12 years to eliminate the personal transportation
component of our greenhouse gas emissions.
Well, whoop-de-do.
Now, every little bit helps.
But consider what the economists call opportunity cost. Shouldn't we be applying
all the time and resources
that would have to be collectively expended in pursuit of this marginal
achievement, on the 88 per cent of the problem?
My point exactly.
Okay, fire up those word processors. Hope they're not powered by coal-fired electric generators.
