Earthanet

Motor Trend’s blog recently posted this exoneration of gas-guzzling passenger cars on the claim that they emit only 18% of all CO2 in the United States. Trust Motor Trend to give us good objective reporting on issues affecting the car industry–not! But then what can you expect from someone who opens his blog post with this:

Crock or not, global warming is a problem for the automobile.

Hellooo? I know your job is important to you, but what about the problem for humans?

The charts he’s referring to can be found in the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory. (choose the Executive Summary .pdf file). I’ve tried to break down the numbers so you don’t have to perform the heroic act of actually reading this thing. All CO2 emissions are measured in teragrams of CO2 equivalent (Tg CO2 Eq.).
Total CO2 emissions: 5983.1
CO2 emissions from transportation sector: 1850.1
1850.1 / 5983.1 = 30.9% (not 30% as Motor Trend Guy says)

For the next step, I had to go into the “Energy” pdf on the EPA page to get past Motor Trend Guy’s spin. (I don’t recommend that you do this either. Whew.)
Total CO2 emissions from passenger vehicles: 630.4 gas + 4.0 diesel (Jetta TDI type cars)
Total CO2 emissions from light duty trucks: 488.0 gas + 26.0 diesel (Dodge Ram type trucks)
Total CO2 from all passenger: 1148.4 / 1850.1 transportation sector total = 62.0% (not 60% as Motor Trend Guy says).

So, 62% of the aforementioned 30.9% of total transportation CO2 emissions (30.9 *.62) gives us 19.16% of total CO2 emissions (not 18% as Motor Trend Guy says). Multiplying the 1148.4 from all passenger vehicles times the 5983.1 for all CO2 gives you 19.19 percent, so I’m comfortable with 19.2%.

OK, so that’s about one-fifth of all CO2 emissions, which supports Motor Trend Guy’s argument that passenger cars are only a small part of the problem, and that we should address the Big Demon, electricity generation, at 40% of all CO2 emissions, while we keep driving our Hummers and G8s.

One small problem with that argument: he left out heavy duty trucks, among other things. Back to the EPA “Energy” chapter. I’ll keep it short and just say that heavy duty trucks (Peterbilt and the like) and buses, gas and diesel combined, account for 21.9% of all transportation CO2. (I’ve left off the remaining categories, because they’re not likely to change anytime soon, but will note that jet fuel is responsible for 12.9% of transportation CO2 emissions.)

So:
Passenger vehicles: 62% of transportation CO2
Trucks and buses: 21.9% of transportation CO2
Total for passenger vehicles, trucks, and buses: 83.9% of transportation CO2
Passenger, trucks, and buses as a percentage of total CO2: 30.9 * .839 = 25.9%

That’s way higher than Motor Trend Guy’s 18%–over one-quarter of total CO2 emissions. The EPA report shows U.S. CO2 emissions up by 14% since 1996. If we could cut our vehicle CO2 emissions by half, we could wipe out that increase.

Now why would Motor Trend Guy single out passenger cars from the huge variety of vehicles with four or more wheels using our nation’s highways to haul people and goods for his statistical analysis? Oh, I get it–he likes cars. I like cars too, but even I’m ready to bury the internal combustion engine, and it’s going to happen across the board. Rail is much more efficient than diesel tractor trailer for moving heavy loads of goods, and buses can be converted over to much cleaner compressed natural gas (many already have).

Remember the part in “An Inconvenient Truth” where Al Gore has to stand on the hydraulic lift to show us where carbon emissions will end up on the graph if we keep up present trends? The whole point of alternative energy is to make that red graph line go down, instead of up. avs4you discounts and downloads