Show cars on the same graph. With and without SUV.
Then include military.
I’m not really into defending SUVs of course, but nor am in into singling them out when the car itself is the tragedy.
Also F1.
And planes.
I don’t own an SUV, but I would . Wrong I know, but in context, not really .
If every SUV was binned tomorrow, and replace with a typical car, that number - reduced by 20% is still awful. And, if Suvs are 20% of all cars. Jesus wept
On the contrary: ships are the third-best one when you consider greenhouse gas emissions per ton-kilometer of cargo moved, which is the metric that matters. They only pollute a lot as a category because there is so much fucking shipping going on. (Reducing that is also an issue, but one for a different thread.)
The only things better are bicycles and sailboats (because they use no fossil fuels at all). Even trains are less efficient, although in the long run they have the advantage of being possible to electrify and run on renewables.
Granted, the other pollution (not greenhouse gas) from ships is terrible because they use the cheapest, nastiest fuel. But as bad as that is, it’s still a much, much lower-priority concern than climate change.
(TBH, what we really need are nuclear cargo ships.)
The biggest problem with your traditional square-rigged ships is that the masts get in the way of modern cargo-handling methods.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the largest sailing ship ever made (SS Great Eastern) had a gross register tonnage of 18,915, while the largest container ship (MSC Irina) has a gross tonnage^1^ of 233,328. In other words, the sails would have to be an order of magnitude larger than any that have ever been made before.
There are some newer sail technologies, such as rotor sails and kite sails, but those are apparently designed to shave 5-10% off the fuel consumption of a primarily engine-powered ship, not act as the primary means of propulsion.
And the other big problem with any of those technologies is that even if they could propel the ship by themselves, they still can’t fully replace engines because logistics companies won’t tolerate getting becalmed anymore. And even if that weren’t an issue, you’ve still got to have an engine for maneuvering in tight channels and ports anyway.
In order to completely eliminate having to burn fuel, nuclear really is the only option.
(^1^ GRT and GT aren’t quite the same thing, but there’s no simple conversion between the two. That said, they should “not differ too greatly” according to Wikipedia.)
Oh, I fully agree there are multiple logistics and engineering challenges that would need to be overcome. But im also aware we are orders of magnitude more advanced than when Great Eastern was designed and built - we used to think we would never get to the moon because a spacecraft couldn’t carry enough coal.
If you could eliminate 80% of fuel costs you could make smaller vessels much more cost effective which, let’s be honest, is the biggest hurdle. Make it sail 95% of the time, small maneuvering engine and electric tugs can eliminate alot of the variable costs… and they only cruise at 10-12kt anyway.
Yes, theoretical hull speed is proportional to hull speed, but mondern cargo ships aren’t optimized for speed - old school clippers were.
They are also more cost effective for crew - which is why you need to automate as much as possible. Electronic winches, hydraulic booms or sheets, instance access to weather, Electronic monitoring, tides and conditions forecasting and access for a harbour pilot to take over could eliminate alot, if not all of transit crew.
Will it be as fast and reliable- no. But if you can make the cost savings outweigh the drawbacks you can make a presentable business case.
I don’t understand your logic. Say SUV’s were on average 50 % worse emitters than regular cars. Now when picking a car you face the choice of emitting 1 unit or 1.5 units of emissions, for basically the same service. If we look around, these kinds of choices are everywhere. Transportation, food, housing, electric power. Often the difference is even bigger than 50 %. Being consistent in choosing/forcing/promoting the better alternative results in a HUGE difference. Of course, if you look at one decision, it’s not decisive. But transportation and cars definitely are a major factor.
I would argue an SUV sucks even for that purpose. And SUV has less cargo space than even a minivan, and is typically less fuel efficient. In general, the majority of SUVs fail to live up to the Sport or Utility functions of their name. They’re just a grossly inefficient oversized sedan.
As an example, I just moved someone out of a dorm yesterday and ended up having to haul a sizeable portion of my daughter’s roommate’s belongings in my van on top of my daughter’s stuff because her roommate’s SUV couldn’t do the job. And my daughter has more stuff. And from the conversation we had, my van gets 5mpg more than her Ford Edge.
I don’t disagree with you there, but my intention wasn’t to compare SUVs/CUVs to other cargo carrying vehicles so much as to point out that sedans and coupes are not nearly as well suited to hauling gear/equipment/boxes.
I am curious which minivan you have, I’m considering getting back into my moonlighting gig and having options for a more fuel efficient vehicle would be good to keep in mind.
Yeah that looks like a really killer feature. would significantly help with the pelican case and (future) roadcases. I have a similar feature in my nissan rogue, but the “stowing” of the seats feels a little hinky.
Mine stow completely flat, the anchor points for the seats are in recesses so they are flush with the floor. I’ve got pretty much the same storage space in my van as I had in my old Ranger with the truck cap on. Maybe a few inches less vertical space, but no fender humps.
Nice alright, yeah with mine, the seats will fold and you have these moving platforms that you can raise to match the seat back level but you can’t put much if any weight on the platform. It’s a cool idea but wasn’t particularly well designed.
Downvoting and ghosting someone who is giving valid information based on being the first to arrive and the very last to leave for dozens of shows often times getting home around 6am or 10am in the morning the next day is pretty dickish.
I’m not forcing anyone to like what I’m saying, I simply ask that the experiences being acknowledged for what they are which only one or two people seem to be doing.
You are attempting to refute data with an anecdote. The assertion isn’t that no SUV is useful, it’s that they are disproportionately wasteful for their level of popularity.
This is a direct quote. Taken at face value, this sentence is saying “everything cars can do, SUVs can also do but SUVs are limited to exactly those capabilities and nothing else.” If we take a logical step, it’s reasonable to go from the quote and it’s breakdown to “SUVs have no real use” because they merely duplicate the capabilities of a car and having a redundant yet unique style of vehicle with no advantages of it’s own makes it pretty not useful.
This is the longer quote
SUVs also use more resources to run and be produced then small cars, without any advantage over them.
How are you getting from
without any advantage over them
to
assertion isn’t that no SUV is useful
? Cause I see nothing that directly supports that claim and implication + the internet is a pretty bad combo given the general lack of subtlety of blank text on a screen.
Edit:
You are attempting to refute data with an anecdote
I reread this, yes I’m using personal experience to refute a point. I won’t deny that, but neither will I deny the validity of this statement. "I was hauling gear that was simply too much for a sedan to handle. I own and haul a Pelican 1660 which is measured at 31.59 x 22.99 x 19.48 in (80.2 x 58.4 x 49.5 cm). That thing wasn’t fitting in a honda civic’s backdoor, let alone safely into the backseat. Then add a folding table 2 plastic tote boxes and my stagelighting bag? No way.
While the “without any advantage over them” is an exaggeration, the point is that SUVs are using a disproportionate amount of resources. A fraction of SUV drivers routinely use them for the unique situation you describe, or for any jobs that a car couldn’t do. I don’t begrudge anyone using the right tool for a job, though rental often would work for infrequent exceptional needs. But the OP is an important point about wastefulness, and focusing on minor semantics or individual use cases is a distraction.
You’re making an assumption that it’s an exaggeration. I actually touched on this earlier but we’re on the Internet and unless someone goes to lengths to make it clear they are exaggerating or being sarcastic or whatever, that kind of stuff does not convey.
Example, I fucking hate all ice cream.
Am I exaggerating or do I actually hate all ice cream?
Interesting read. I’m inclined to agree with the author that the UN 2086 population peak is BS and humanity will hit population peak sooner (potentially in the first half of the century).
United Nations’ expert “model” appears to have picked an arbitrary long-term fertility rate out of who-knows-where to which all regions asymptote, abruptly abandoning their current declines to head for theory-land! I’m honestly a bit aghast.
That articles always mention the economic models will cause catastrophic disasters since they are based on infinite growth. But economics models are notoriously bad. They can never perfect a recession and predictions are almost never hit. So why would this be any different. We will get by but maybe just in a different way
Economic models are bad at predicting the exact time of a recession, but basically all economist can agree that we will have a recession in the future. We had enough of them in the past.
However the point in the article is that we live on a planet with limited resources and resource consumption and the size of the economy are linked. So the idea is that we run out of resources. A good example of that is climate change. We have a limited somewhat save carbon budget and are on the edge of moving past it. This is why we see a massive heat wave in India right now, for example. That heat wave is really bad for the economy. This is one of the ways civilizations have collapsed in the past.
Also I’d like to add: if the maths behind economic models have yet to be perfected (and are inadequate), we can still look to historical examples as models for collapses from resource shocks. Some good examples include the Late Bronze Age (likely drought), Mayan (drought from warming), Khmer (drought), Ming (drought from cooling), which are all climate/resource related. Food has been the primary energy resource besides wood (which has also led to collapses), but nowadays oil might hold that title. I do think it’s possible that we may get by in a different way, but that’s only because there’s others things we still missed out on our better models (new invention, alien contact, nuclear physics breakthrough, divine intervention, nature of reality revelation, etc.)
The drop in population in historical civilizational collapses are much sharper than even World3 would indicate. World3 assumes perfect allocation of resources, technological investments with no unforeseen effects, no military, war, pandemics, natural disasters, etc.
Especially technological investments can very much mean a higher population as well. Say we find a way to easily cure cancer for example. That means people live longer and that means a higher population.
But fuel taxes are not protecting the environment. They are not high enough to fund environmental remediation, nor do they cover the costs of other externalities of road travel like pavement damage, accidents, and congestion
So raise them?
Transportation analysts record travel distance using a variety of methods that require equipment ranging from vehicle odometers to GPS-based technology.
I am deeply uncomfortable with this. It is already a huge privacy problem that new vehicles come with all sorts of tracking systems that transmit information remotely, but at least having these enabled isn’t a legal obligation. If such a bill is passed I would say there is a 100% chance that this will also be used to prevent people from opting out from mass surveillance of their movements under the pretext of tax compliance.
As an alternative, what about instead taxing companies for the commutes and business travel of their employees? In that case it isn’t necessary to track vehicles on an individual basis, instead you keep track of where employees live relative to their workplaces and work from home rates. I understand commercial trucking is already generally tracked, and that is the biggest impact on wearing down the roads, so tax that too. You don’t need to be forcing individuals to regularly check in with the government about where they’ve been and how much they have been traveling.
Everything we do grows us and everyone around us grows, growth is evolution and change.
You may be thinking of it as a critique of unsustainable population demands, but the word growth means so much more beyond that. We grow as people, we watch nature and loved ones grow, we grow fond of new things, just to name a few.
As for a better name, iunno anything that focuses on what you want to see, sustainabile populations or something?
Donut economics is maybe a better term for what degrowth wants to achieve. Namely that would be limiting enviromental impact to stay within planetary boundaries while providing a good quality of life for everybody. Other terms are wellbeing economy and so forth trying to grow different more diverse indicators. That is certainly an improvment over using basically only GDP.
As for talking about growth, the key has to be to frame it in a different way. Instead of calling for lower consumption, call for less work instead. Obviously less work leads to lower production, which means lower consumption. However it shows a direct practical advantage which everybody feels directly in their life. In practical terms that would be calls for earlier retirment, shorter work weeks, more vacation time and so forth. That really falls into the problematic framing of the enviromental footprint and consumption. Obviously that is part of the problem, but it pretends that consumers have all the power, when in fact production is mostly controlled by capitalists.
Speaking of capitalists, we always see these statistics comparing countries and then blaiming the wealthy countries for destroying the enviroment. However the much indicator of enviromental damage caused by an individual is their income, rather then their country of origin. That is to say an Indian billionaire is worse for the enviroment then a French mechanic. Obviously wealthy countries have more rich people. However when you have 1% of the global population responsible for 16% of emissions, we know were to start. That is btw more then the share of emissions of the US at 14.6% and a bit more then twice as much as the EUs at 7.9% in 2019, for 77 million people. The top 10% are responsible for 50% of global emissions. Besides some micro nations not country has a majority of its population being a member of the global 10%.
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