Study Shows Pollution From Driving Worse Than Flying — The Road More Traveled Has Made All the Difference
To drive or to fly? That is the question. Researchers at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo have predicted that pollution from cars will be the chief global warming agent for the next 100 years. So the green answer is to fly.
The study carried out by CICERO monitored known pollutants in different transport sectors (air, ground, rail, and shipping), and how the global emissions in the year 2000 affects current global temperature. The good news is that pollution from aviation is rather short lived, and not directly linked to long term global warming. According to researcher Jan Fuglestvedt, “air transport has several strong, but short lasting, effects on global temperature.”
- » See also: Study: Electric Cars Produce 30% More Emissions Than Ethanol Cars
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The bad news is that automobile pollution has the ability to raise our temperature six times higher than airplane traffic. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that we drive enough miles to pollute more than the countless flights that move in and out of our airports every day, but according to CICERO we do. The high total fuel consumption and road traffic across the world is what causes greater pollution from cars. Not to mention carbon dioxide from automobile traffic has a more lasting effect.
One of the biggest uncertainties that the study addresses is how do pollutants like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxides intereact with one another in the atmosphere. Over the past thirty years, shipping pollution has had a slight cooling effect on the atmosphere because of the high levels of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. They also did not calculate pollution per person, which will be conducted in a later study.
Just some food for thought next time you’re deciding whether you should fly or drive this holiday season with your carbon footprint in mind.
Photo Credit: BecauseOf’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons License.
Source: Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo
This doesn’t address volume at all. You could find a similar study saying private jets impact the environment less than cars, but does that all mean we should fly in private jets? No, because planes are still more energy intensive per traveler.
Actually, if you make your comparison based on real load values rather than maximum vehicle capacity, you will find that commercial aircraft are the most efficient.
This is the same biased cr@p that I have come to expect from Gas2.0.
There is no way that lifting hundreds of tons of airplane just to move fruit or people across the country is more efficient than ground transportation. The fuel is practically the same as diesel so the pollution is nearly the same as Train or Truck emissions and you don’t have to lift a train to 5 miles above the ground and hold it there for hours of travel.
If you read the referred article, they say that “It is important to underline that the study looks at the effect of the total global emissions, not emissions per passenger kilometer”. This means with the current shipping distribution where most things get shipped by boat, planes contribute less. Fine less things get shipped by plane there for less total emissions. Stop right there; imply nothing more.
This article is being used to conclude that you should fly more. This goes against everything that the article is asking - with the current balance of transportation, what is the emissions of air flight compared to the total transportation infrastructure. You might use this data for political redirection and possibly where to focus investment in efficiency technologies and get the most return, but to tell the public that they should fly more because it is efficient is misleading and a Gas2.0 it appears more and more intentional.
The even more important metric the authors should look at emissions per pound of goods shipped per mile traveled. This will tell you the true cost of shipping and travel.
@ greendoughnuts
Just because one author sets you off doesn’t mean all of our content is “biased crap.” If you actually read all of our stuff, you would clearly see we try very hard to level a realistic eye on the world of alternative transportation.
Ironically, you’ve applied the same ignorance of details which you suggest cloud Anthony Cefali’s conclusions in your analysis that you’ve come to expect all of gas 2.0’s content to be biased crap.
I actually fully agree with you that the conclusions in this particular post ignore several factors, but that’s why discussions in the comments are welcome.
For you to make unfounded blanket accusations about an entire website’s content is nasty propaganda and I challenge you to find more than a few examples that support your rhetoric.
Funny thing is before greens rant I was thinking something similar, but about Anthony not gas2.0. I find most of the articles and comments pretty informative, but Anthony is a raging left wing duffel bag.
@Nick Chambers
No. I do not have the time to refute all of Gas 2.0 misunderstandings. But more than 10 times I have had the desire of correcting errors. Your reporters have either parroted other websites directly without doing original research or you completely change the results of published papers or reports of true scientists.
I come to websites for information not to correct them. I find myself correcting more than learning here. This is a waste of my time, so when I do see flagrant misrepresentation, I call a spade and spade.
Unlike Doug, I do not blame the author - I blame the funding of the disinformation from Gas 2.0. The editors here have to call BS on more articles or at least send them back for further review.
If the car is more detrimental to the total world climate than a plane, then we are in for a bunpy ride, it is estimated that China alone are going to need around 300 million new motor vehicles to supply demand over the next twenty to thirty years, and estimates are normally always underestimated.
What is very ironic is, all new cars are fited with a C A T which converts the monxides into the main green house gas, how stupid is that, California Mission is then 100 percent hot air.
How many more billions of tons of the stuff can our planet handle before it changes the way we live and produce food, this should be our main concirn, not how many new cars we can put into the system while taking old ones out, it will stay the same year on year getting slightly larger as we go.
Some scientists are saying the balance is already too little to late, I simply hope for our children they are wrong.