Oh, is it rant o'clock?
Jolly good, here's my pennies worth, ahem....
The last scrappage scheme was introduced to reduce the level of carbon emissions which pushed car owners to move over to diesel. Since then we have seen a rise in nitrogen oxide levels which has been ‘linked’ to 12,000 premature deaths in 20113 (Env. Agency)
Now that diesel is evil, the government wants to introduce another scrappage scheme for diesel cars, and if the majority of the 11 million diesel car owners take advantage of this, then we will probably end up with carbon emissions again. Back to square one.
Apparently scrapping all of diesel vehicles would see a 45% drop in nitrous oxide emissions but we wouldn’t see a significant drop in level of particulates in the air. These particulates are produced by all vehicles that use brakes to stop and which roll on rubber tires, including electric cars.
So are diesel car drivers are being victimised? 75% of the big polluters on our roads are HGV, Lorries, vans and busses. Not individually owned cars. The lifecycle of cars is the shortest in terms of product life expectancy of all the various transport modes, at around 5 years. This short life cycle means that innovations in technology are put into effect at a faster rate than other modes of transport with longer life expectancies meaning that generally they are being less environmentally ‘harmful’ with every successive generation, whereas the average age of our train rolling stock is around 18 to 20 years meaning that the technology on the rolling stock is very old compared to cars, hence more polluting for longer periods. I know this doesn't wash with our old birds, but you get the gist.
These diesel trains are large polluters, hence exposure to particulates and fumes are increased around train stations. Cambridge did some studies around Paddington Station and found that passengers were exposed up to 5 times the amount of diesel pollutants when compared to local road levels. Around 38 million passengers go through Paddington Station annually, all of them exposed to high levels of diesel pollution. Multiply this by all the other stations in London alone and you can see that 100’s of millions of people are probably being exposed to very high levels of pollution annually. Suddenly the diesel car isn’t looking so guilty in my book.
Another massive criminal in diesel pollution are the increasingly huge cruise ships. While they are sat alongside the port, their systems idling, they are pumping out tonnes of diesel fumes up into the air again causing highly concentrated areas of diesel pollution. Southampton is suffering greatly from diesel pollution and the local council wants to ban diesel cars from the city centreI, but the mighty cruisehip s anybody picking on them in such a high profile? Nope. I’m sure all the small pleasure craft cruising up and down the Thames are also contributing to all the pollution.
If everyone is thinking we should all change to electric cars because they are cleaner, think again. There are still high levels of particulate matter produced, primarily from brakes and tires.
There are also concerns around the (current) battery technology. A lot of them are produced using rare earth elements which are non-recyclable. These elements are generally extracted from the ground by open cast mining using diesel operated vehicles and plant. The form of extraction used to obtain these elements means that these open pit mines are so vast that one pit in China is 1,000 metres deep and spans 48 square kilometres. The levels of pollution created by these open pit mines also has massive impact on the local areas, with ground water and river pollution killing just about everything, and vast slag heaps full of crap. For example, processing one tonne of rare earths produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste. One open cast mine in China produces 10 million tonnes of wastewater annually. But going electric is green, right?
Moving on from the production of the batteries, what about their end of use? Instead of carbon and NOX in the air, we end up with landfill sites filled with knackered old batteries, again polluting ground waters and rivers, or the batteries get sent to third world countries for kids to dismantle to extract what they can, making them very ill in the process and polluting their country. But who cares about Third world kids, right?
Also to consider is this, electricity has to be produced. By means of nuclear power stations, coal, gas, or the burning of biomass and increasingly (praise be) from solar and wind. There is a price to pay for the electricity produced, whether it be radioactive spent fuel rods, coal emissions and holes in the ground, depleted gas reserves, the cutting and down burning of trees (ironically the trees are probably transported overland by diesel trucks, loaded onto ships and then transported vast distances by sea using diesel, arrive at destination to be transported again by diesel trucks to produce the electricity to run ‘green’ cars). There’s always a bill to pay. So I guess what I’m saying is, don’t pick on me because I’m an easy target and a cash cow to your bullshit policies.
Apparently, growing rubber plants, peace Lillie’s and bamboo palm all help to absorb some of these pollutants, so get growing them to help mitigate things a little. Rant over.
Thank you.
Where have I heard that before?
