Car Nation
Yes, I'm going to talk about cars, environmental implications thereof, yet again.
A few preliminaries:
1) I'm actually feeling quite tired and might genuinely try to go to bed early tonight. This might be because as well as being really hot, I've been up since 8:45 (meaning I only slept for about four hours).
2) Music: Pyar Ka Hai Bairi, by ... actually I'm not sure, it came off of a Rough Guides compilation...
3) I must hold up my hand and confess I drive a 2.0 Mégane made way back in '97, i.e. not very enviro. According to the computer we average low-to-mid 30's mpg. But in my defence, having an older car saves the environmental and resource costs of building a new one, which by some accounts are greater than the emissions actually produced over the lifetime of a car. Plus it's not my car, and I don't use it very often. So we're 'only' a three-car family and I really must stress that only one of those is used every day.
4) I don't really understand the bad flower pun that is the title of said TV programme, but it raises some interesting issues so I shall forgive it.
5) Dad seems to think I have a choice about eating plain-chocolate digestives... to paraphrase Bart Simpson, "I don't control the biscuits... the biscuits control me". Whoever put them in the biscuit barrel instead of hidden in a cupboard may regret it in a few hours' time...
To business; three main points:
6) A most curious couple called Speakman, who drove their young children to the zoo to explain how pollution produced by humans was causing the extinction of animal species. In a Humvee. To be fair, the guy acknowledged the discrepancy, and said that he'd be prepared to give it up for a smaller car if forced to by legislation. But why not self-legislate? He could have, but didn't, go for the "it doesn't make any difference what one British family does, we are but minnows to the American and Chinese whales" line of self-justification. Which is, I suppose, a good thing.
7) A dude driving around London in a teensy electric car, whose other car really was a Porsche. He freely admitted that enviromental concerns weren't the main reason. However, cars like this do have a certain appealing craziness, and might really make sense for people who need to make short, urban journeys. The fact that they produce zero local pollution and are very quiet must count in their favour; imagine a city without all the traffic noise :) But the charge levelled at electric cars, aside from their short range, low speed and general silliness, is that they simply shift pollution to another place. Clearly it's no good running a car with power from a coal station. But of course there are companies supplying clean electricity, so maybe it's a limited solution. There's a French company that is/was experimenting with compressed air power for city vehicles, which is exciting. Hydrogen fuel cells are the most promising in the long run, I think. I was pleased to note in Bath the other day that old buses are being replaced by newer, cleaner ones, including a lot of Optare Solos, the only bus I know of that was included in the Design Council's list of Millennium Products. I don't know whether they're running on LPG though.
8) Supplementary to this, it appears that a lot of people still think the Prius and other hybrids are 'electric cars', that are slow or sound like milkfloats [incidentally, Just Say No to petrol/diesel powered milkfloats] or need to be plugged in... please, just reserve judgement unless you know what you're talking about, OK? I'm not denying that some people know more than me about everything, of course. I've never even touched a Prius.
9) This simplistic crusade against anything that has four driven wheels. It's just silly, and I don't think I need to go into all the reasons why particularly as nobody is reading this. As for the almost equally simplistic crusade against anything off-roader-shaped, that's also silly. An anti-4x4 campaigner was shown bitching about a Land Rover Freelander TD4. I checked the figures and this simply isn't fair; whatever you think about the image of this car, it really isn't an environmental supervillain. 37mpg on the combined cycle, and just over 200g/km of carbon dioxide, so pretty much in line with a 2.0-litre saloon car. They may not be particularly virtuous but there's no way drivers of small 4x4s like the CR-V or RAV-4 deserve to be victimised on any genuine emissions/consumption grounds.
Anyway my overall thoughts; cars are OK for occasional use, for trips to see friends or summer drives to the beach or whatever. But I really, really hope I don't end up in a car in a traffic jam for four hours a day...
Must find something else to blog about... something people will actually read...
Or maybe get to bed... am making progress with Pride & Prejudice, and realising just how good the BBC version is :)
A few preliminaries:
1) I'm actually feeling quite tired and might genuinely try to go to bed early tonight. This might be because as well as being really hot, I've been up since 8:45 (meaning I only slept for about four hours).
2) Music: Pyar Ka Hai Bairi, by ... actually I'm not sure, it came off of a Rough Guides compilation...
3) I must hold up my hand and confess I drive a 2.0 Mégane made way back in '97, i.e. not very enviro. According to the computer we average low-to-mid 30's mpg. But in my defence, having an older car saves the environmental and resource costs of building a new one, which by some accounts are greater than the emissions actually produced over the lifetime of a car. Plus it's not my car, and I don't use it very often. So we're 'only' a three-car family and I really must stress that only one of those is used every day.
4) I don't really understand the bad flower pun that is the title of said TV programme, but it raises some interesting issues so I shall forgive it.
5) Dad seems to think I have a choice about eating plain-chocolate digestives... to paraphrase Bart Simpson, "I don't control the biscuits... the biscuits control me". Whoever put them in the biscuit barrel instead of hidden in a cupboard may regret it in a few hours' time...
To business; three main points:
6) A most curious couple called Speakman, who drove their young children to the zoo to explain how pollution produced by humans was causing the extinction of animal species. In a Humvee. To be fair, the guy acknowledged the discrepancy, and said that he'd be prepared to give it up for a smaller car if forced to by legislation. But why not self-legislate? He could have, but didn't, go for the "it doesn't make any difference what one British family does, we are but minnows to the American and Chinese whales" line of self-justification. Which is, I suppose, a good thing.
7) A dude driving around London in a teensy electric car, whose other car really was a Porsche. He freely admitted that enviromental concerns weren't the main reason. However, cars like this do have a certain appealing craziness, and might really make sense for people who need to make short, urban journeys. The fact that they produce zero local pollution and are very quiet must count in their favour; imagine a city without all the traffic noise :) But the charge levelled at electric cars, aside from their short range, low speed and general silliness, is that they simply shift pollution to another place. Clearly it's no good running a car with power from a coal station. But of course there are companies supplying clean electricity, so maybe it's a limited solution. There's a French company that is/was experimenting with compressed air power for city vehicles, which is exciting. Hydrogen fuel cells are the most promising in the long run, I think. I was pleased to note in Bath the other day that old buses are being replaced by newer, cleaner ones, including a lot of Optare Solos, the only bus I know of that was included in the Design Council's list of Millennium Products. I don't know whether they're running on LPG though.
8) Supplementary to this, it appears that a lot of people still think the Prius and other hybrids are 'electric cars', that are slow or sound like milkfloats [incidentally, Just Say No to petrol/diesel powered milkfloats] or need to be plugged in... please, just reserve judgement unless you know what you're talking about, OK? I'm not denying that some people know more than me about everything, of course. I've never even touched a Prius.
9) This simplistic crusade against anything that has four driven wheels. It's just silly, and I don't think I need to go into all the reasons why particularly as nobody is reading this. As for the almost equally simplistic crusade against anything off-roader-shaped, that's also silly. An anti-4x4 campaigner was shown bitching about a Land Rover Freelander TD4. I checked the figures and this simply isn't fair; whatever you think about the image of this car, it really isn't an environmental supervillain. 37mpg on the combined cycle, and just over 200g/km of carbon dioxide, so pretty much in line with a 2.0-litre saloon car. They may not be particularly virtuous but there's no way drivers of small 4x4s like the CR-V or RAV-4 deserve to be victimised on any genuine emissions/consumption grounds.
Anyway my overall thoughts; cars are OK for occasional use, for trips to see friends or summer drives to the beach or whatever. But I really, really hope I don't end up in a car in a traffic jam for four hours a day...
Must find something else to blog about... something people will actually read...
Or maybe get to bed... am making progress with Pride & Prejudice, and realising just how good the BBC version is :)
posted by Z31 at 11:03 pm
2 Comments:
Petrol/diesel powered milkfloats are really annoying, as well as rubbish environmentally.
When our milk provider in westwood changed a while back they started using some sort of noisy fuel* powered floats, that had a rather annoying habit of either coming at like 5 in the morning and waking everybody up or coming at about 8 when everyone had pretty much had breakfast ans left, thereby defeating the point of getting milk delivered.
*Would you say electricity is a fuel? I seem to remember some geography/chemistry/physics/re lesson where fuel was defined as a power source that is burned in order to acess it's energy. Just wondering as it came up in the pub quiz last week ('what fuel does the london underground run on?''electricity'). We got it right and then won in the quiz, despite failing miserably on the sports round.
No, I'd agree with you, electricity's not a fuel. You use a fuel to generate electricity, in many cases. Obviously in this quiz, electricity was the answer they wanted; I guess you could have claimed 'coal' or 'gas' or 'Uranium-238' but it would've been a bit spurious. Well done with the quizzage; sports rounds suck don't they... I always worry that if I was on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' I could do very well as long as there wasn't an 'easy' football question for like £200... (could always ask the audience I guess...)
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