12 ms·

One thing that I struggle with, as someone who is not a policy maker, is understanding the proportion of carbon emissions associated with different activities,

One thing that I struggle with, as someone who is not a policy maker, is understanding the proportion of carbon emissions associated with different activities, for example, what would be the carbon emissions savings of these different options: - The yearly energy savings of optimizing millions of web pages to reduce server side and local energy consumption? - Banning personal vehicle diesel engines for 12 Months? - Not shipping tonnes of tropical food across the Oceans for 12 months? - Everybody not buying new clothes for 12 Months? - Everybody not buying a new electronic device for 12 months? I am not claiming that we should all go amish and bankrupt entire sections of the economy, my point is, these are all direct ways to curb carbon emissions but I have no intuition of how big of a dent in the overall emissions each option would make. What are the carbon emissions that, if curbed, would provide the most bang for buck if you will?

lowwave 6y ago
And also don't forget to include Carbon emission emitted by natural event such as volcano eruptions
jakecopp 6y ago
I think we should create a carbon/pollution tax and let the invisible hand of the market figure that out - it's too complex and there are so many side effects to adjusting things by brute force!
- londons_explore 6y ago
  A carbon tax implemented by a "world dictator" would work. Any individual country implementing a carbon tax doesn't work because they put themselves at a big disadvantage, and goods and services go across country borders, taking with them almost-impossible to fairly calculate amounts of carbon. The biggest things the world could do towards the "world dictator" approach would be: * Have a consortium of countries implement a carbon tax, while taxing all inbound goods from countries that don't tax carbon. * Adjust WTO rules to allow taxing imports based on estimated carbon content. * Have the WTO decide which countries are "on track to meet carbon reduction targets". Allow taxes on imports from any country that isn't. * Allow countries to "sue" another country for environmental damages. When they don't pay up, have a UN court able to threaten anything up to military action/takeover of the country's leadership to get payment.
  - fetbaffe 6y ago
    Problem is free trade & WHO itself, it is easier to go back to tariffs, by making things more expensive people will consume less, you can also increase quality & add requirements that a product must reparable.
  - redisman 6y ago
    You really only need the US to implement it as they're the consumer kings of the world. You can't just go sell a million SUV's to the Russians or Europeans or Ethiopians because you didn't want to pay the carbon tax in the US.
- anon9001 6y ago
  Does that actually work? I would think the invisible hand of the market would re-route all that pollution to areas without the tax and the earth wouldn't see that much difference. It's not like they're going to stop selling oil if the EU and US agree to stop burning so much of it. I agree it's complex, but I think carbon taxes might be part of the complexity. If we're going to start messing about with markets, we should outright ban the offending activity and regulate harshly. If we're going to apply tokenomics to the problem and pretend we fixed it until we're too old to care, that seems worse somehow. Or we can just do nothing and hope technology saves us. That's what the actual bet is whether we like it or not.
  - Proziam 6y ago
    You can apply such a tax in various ways. If the company resides in the US, directly tax the company. If they are importing, tax the imported goods. The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules because then large companies could lobby one entity to shift the rules in their favor, and against ours.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      > The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules Surely the worst thing would be to set up a Prisoners Dilemma trap where individual countries have a huge incentive to betray all the other countries by abandoning this tax and attracting all the large companies in the world to come and pollute there.
      - Proziam 6y ago
        I'm not particularly concerned about a prisoner dillemma trap. If one country did that, the immediate response from all other countries could simply be 'stop all trade with that country' or simply 'crank up the import taxes from them' until they shape up. You also don't need anywhere near 100% agreement for this to be effective. A large company losing just a few key markets (US, Germany, UK, blah) could massively outweigh any benefit they could imagine by trying to game such a system.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  The invisible hand is severely tied though.
- ip26 6y ago
  I like the elegance, but am growing to believe voters are simply unwilling to implement it. Mainly because "taxes" are eternally unpopular. It's possible that the best solution is actually the most implementable solution, rather than the most optimal solution.
TheUndead96 6y ago
I am also curious about this. I heard that something like one trans-Atlantic flight is worth 2 years of veganism. And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe. These are vague statements, and the reality is certainly more nuanced, but it would be nice to have a sense for what the big issues are. For example: Would giving up coffee, with its links to deforestation, be tremendously beneficial or only marginally?
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  "And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe." This one is highly misleading. They may produce some very specific pollution more than entire Europe together, but pollution overall will be clearly lower. Emissions of just C02 is about 4000 megatonnes in just EU ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#/media/File:World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... ) 4000 / 10 / 365 = 1.1 megatone per day. I am not expert on ships, but emitting 1 100 000 000 t of C02 per day seems unlikely.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    As always, it's complex. Most freight ships will burn marine fuels such a 'bunker fuel' when they are offshore not near ports, largely due to the health risk of increased PM in the air near ports. The issue with fuels as unrefined as 'bunker fuel' (the thing is practically crude) is that they emmit a really high concentration of other gas other than CO2, namely SO2 and NO2. > "SO2 shipping emissions are projected to increase and by 2020 exceed SO2 emissions from all land-based sources such as power plants in the EU, which over the past several decades have been reduced dramatically at great cost to industry." [0] CO2 is obviously our major pollutant but Sulphur dioxide (SO2) is a major green-house gas contributor. The frustrating thing about bunker fuel is that it is used offshore purely because it is cheaper and there is no regulation curbing it. As with almost all things environmental related we go back to the hidden long-term costs of having something cheap in the short-term. [0]https://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/sulphur-marine-fuels https://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/sulphur-ma...
wjnc 6y ago
Oblique mention of Project Drawdown that tries to tackle such questions (albeit at a slightly more abstract level) methodically [1] [1] https://drawdown.org/ https://drawdown.org/
dehrmann 6y ago
Heating, cooling, and transportation probably dominate your personal carbon footprint.
- cpach 6y ago
  What about eating meat?
  - fetbaffe 6y ago
    By removing meat more people would starve. Now that can be a good thing because fewer people means less energy consumption, however you still need to make that moral argument that starvation is an acceptable solution for reducing energy consumption.
    - mac01021 6y ago
      I've missed something. If I stop eating meat then people will starve? Are you talking about the meat farmers?
      - fetbaffe 6y ago
        I’m talking about that the society as a whole will produce less food if we all would go vegan.
        mac01021 6y ago
        It would be a big change for sure, but maybe less of a problem than you imagine: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-animal-protein-vs-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-an... Also there's the fact that, per calorie, producing beef requires an order of magnitude more arable land than producing <insert-your-favorite-vegetable-here>, since cattle eat so much more than humans do.
        fetbaffe 6y ago
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The cost of things gives you a reasonable idea of the environmental impact. Energy intensive products and services have to pay for all that fuel. This is why cities produce more CO2 than rural areas. Potentially it is more efficient to live in a city but city dwellers are richer and hence spend and consume more. I went to a talk by the economist Jeffrey Sachs a few years ago where he said the sustainable level of spending around the world was about $10K USD PPP. Not much room for a Tesla in that budget.
higerordermap 6y ago
Yeah no estimate is available for this as of now. But developers continue to write inefficient code even if other consequences are obvious: * If using cloud, often inefficient software will lead to higher expenses than developer time. * On mobile devices battery life is important * On mobile networks bundle sizes matter
CaptArmchair 6y ago
Barring biases for the outlet itself for a moment, Vox did a pretty good video on this issue within the context of electricity consumption. https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430916/2020-presidential-election-climate-change https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430916/2020-presidential-ele... Even policy makers struggle with this. It's very hard to make a comprehensive, understandable model that connects all the dots across the board. So, that's what this piece is about. And here's the actual graph from the video: http://energyliteracy.com/ http://energyliteracy.com/ The argument presented here isn't to reduce consumption - although, in absolute terms, that directly impacts carbon emissions - but to strategically replace fossil fuel sources for clean energy (solar, wind, water,...). It's an interesting perspective because it avoids turning the discussion about "consumption reduction" into a debate about token use cases such as "millions of web pages need to consume less energy." To put it more succinctly, it's more interesting to consider the origin of the electricity coming out of the socket in a datacenter or housing then how it gets used by hardware plugged into those sockets. I'll give you a for instance. Suppose you have to pick a host for your personal website and you're mindful about energy consumption. So, you're considering Digital Ocean: What type of energy is powering their datacenters? Turns out they don't really communicate about that, but intrepid users have figured it out (data februari 2020): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-kind-of-electricity-do-you-run-on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-kind-o... So, if you choose NYC1 as your region when you pick a droplet, that's assumed to be powered by 100% wind energy. Same with people who visit your website. Suppose, in some utopian way, 100% of your visitors have solar, batteries and are off the grid, then their daily visits to your website will have a reduced impact as well. Why reduced and not net-zero? Because the intermediate network infrastructure between NYC1 and, say, a visitor living in California, needs to be powered as well and there's no guarantee traffic won't be handled by fossil fuel powered network nodes at this point in time.
lucian1900 6y ago
Diesel cars have significantly lower carbon emissions than petrol cars and even than some electric car usage when accounting for the energy production. Diesels are even the best placed to run on biofuels. Why single them out?
- fyfy18 6y ago
  The issue with diesel engines is the fuel does not burn as cleanly in terms of particulate matter. Biodiesel and dinosaur diesel are both the same in this. For the last 15 years or so new diesel cars in Europe have been required to have a diesel particulate filter with the aim of reducing this. Unlike a catalytic converter though, eventually (after 150,000km or so) they will become blocked up and cause a noticeable drop in power or cause engine fault codes. At that point you need to replace it, which could be a few thousand Euro for a new DPF, or the more common option is to remove it. This is illegal in most EU countries, but also a blind eye is turned to it - even in places with strict emissions checks like the UK. AdBlue is a modern way of reducing this even more, but there are already devices you can buy that will trick the ECU into thinking your tank of AdBlue is full when its actually empty. Combined with other common issues like injectors wearing out, as a diesel engine gets old it will burn fuel a lot dirtier than a similar aged petrol engine.
  - lucian1900 6y ago
    None of that has anything to do with carbon emissions, which do not increase with poor maintenance (unlike NOx or particulates). And they're all manageable issues, unlike the carbon emissions of petrol engines.
    - fyfy18 6y ago
      That's true, but diesel engines are only really less polluting in terms of CO2 due to using a lower amount of fuel consumed. If your goal is to reduce that, then as you say biofuels are the right answer. However any mass adoption to biofuels would require different engine (existing engines will work fine on a low blend of biofuels, but very few will work on 10P%). For cars, why would you stick with a biodiesel engine which is more complicated and has higher levels of other pollutants, than some sort of biogasoline engine?
nuker 6y ago
> Banning personal vehicle diesel engines Diesel is not worse than petrol: Diesel cars tend to have lower volumetric fuel consumption figures than comparable gasoline vehicles. However, the benefit in terms of CO2 emissions is significantly lower, as the combustion of 1 liter of diesel fuel releases approximately 13% more CO2 than for the same amount of gasoline.
- kuu 6y ago
  > the combustion of 1 liter of diesel fuel releases approximately 13% more CO2 than for the same amount of gasoline But with a liter of diesel (usually) you can make more kms than with a liter of gasoline. I'm not sure the CO2/km of each class of motor, though
  - samoa42 6y ago
    imho both effects stem mostly from the fact that diesel has ~11% higher density than gasoline. (ie. mileage and co2-output become more equal if measured against mass rather than volume)
- ctdeneen 6y ago
  I believe the issue with diesel is NO2, basically it may emit less but it's worse for us https://www.theengineer.co.uk/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-really-more-polluting-than-petrol-cars/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-rea...
  - nuker 6y ago
    > ..it's worse for us Is diesel CO2+NO2 is worse than petrol CO2+NO2 for global warming?
    - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      Potentially Diesel has less CO2 emissions than Petrol if that is the point you want to insist on. The major issue with Diesel is NO2 emissions, on top of respiratory issues directly attributed to NO2 in city centres, NO2 is also a reducer of human longevity. [0] I would say anything that is slowly killing us and reducing our lifespan should be pretty high on our priorities list. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801524/?report=classic https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801524/?report...

lowwave 6y ago

And also don't forget to include Carbon emission emitted by natural event such as volcano eruptions

jakecopp 6y ago

I think we should create a carbon/pollution tax and let the invisible hand of the market figure that out - it's too complex and there are so many side effects to adjusting things by brute force!

londons_explore 6y ago
A carbon tax implemented by a "world dictator" would work. Any individual country implementing a carbon tax doesn't work because they put themselves at a big disadvantage, and goods and services go across country borders, taking with them almost-impossible to fairly calculate amounts of carbon. The biggest things the world could do towards the "world dictator" approach would be: * Have a consortium of countries implement a carbon tax, while taxing all inbound goods from countries that don't tax carbon. * Adjust WTO rules to allow taxing imports based on estimated carbon content. * Have the WTO decide which countries are "on track to meet carbon reduction targets". Allow taxes on imports from any country that isn't. * Allow countries to "sue" another country for environmental damages. When they don't pay up, have a UN court able to threaten anything up to military action/takeover of the country's leadership to get payment.
- fetbaffe 6y ago
  Problem is free trade & WHO itself, it is easier to go back to tariffs, by making things more expensive people will consume less, you can also increase quality & add requirements that a product must reparable.
- redisman 6y ago
  You really only need the US to implement it as they're the consumer kings of the world. You can't just go sell a million SUV's to the Russians or Europeans or Ethiopians because you didn't want to pay the carbon tax in the US.
anon9001 6y ago
Does that actually work? I would think the invisible hand of the market would re-route all that pollution to areas without the tax and the earth wouldn't see that much difference. It's not like they're going to stop selling oil if the EU and US agree to stop burning so much of it. I agree it's complex, but I think carbon taxes might be part of the complexity. If we're going to start messing about with markets, we should outright ban the offending activity and regulate harshly. If we're going to apply tokenomics to the problem and pretend we fixed it until we're too old to care, that seems worse somehow. Or we can just do nothing and hope technology saves us. That's what the actual bet is whether we like it or not.
- Proziam 6y ago
  You can apply such a tax in various ways. If the company resides in the US, directly tax the company. If they are importing, tax the imported goods. The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules because then large companies could lobby one entity to shift the rules in their favor, and against ours.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules Surely the worst thing would be to set up a Prisoners Dilemma trap where individual countries have a huge incentive to betray all the other countries by abandoning this tax and attracting all the large companies in the world to come and pollute there.
    - Proziam 6y ago
      I'm not particularly concerned about a prisoner dillemma trap. If one country did that, the immediate response from all other countries could simply be 'stop all trade with that country' or simply 'crank up the import taxes from them' until they shape up. You also don't need anywhere near 100% agreement for this to be effective. A large company losing just a few key markets (US, Germany, UK, blah) could massively outweigh any benefit they could imagine by trying to game such a system.
johnisgood 6y ago
The invisible hand is severely tied though.
ip26 6y ago
I like the elegance, but am growing to believe voters are simply unwilling to implement it. Mainly because "taxes" are eternally unpopular. It's possible that the best solution is actually the most implementable solution, rather than the most optimal solution.

TheUndead96 6y ago

I am also curious about this. I heard that something like one trans-Atlantic flight is worth 2 years of veganism. And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe. These are vague statements, and the reality is certainly more nuanced, but it would be nice to have a sense for what the big issues are. For example: Would giving up coffee, with its links to deforestation, be tremendously beneficial or only marginally?

matkoniecz 6y ago
"And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe." This one is highly misleading. They may produce some very specific pollution more than entire Europe together, but pollution overall will be clearly lower. Emissions of just C02 is about 4000 megatonnes in just EU ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#/media/File:World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... ) 4000 / 10 / 365 = 1.1 megatone per day. I am not expert on ships, but emitting 1 100 000 000 t of C02 per day seems unlikely.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  As always, it's complex. Most freight ships will burn marine fuels such a 'bunker fuel' when they are offshore not near ports, largely due to the health risk of increased PM in the air near ports. The issue with fuels as unrefined as 'bunker fuel' (the thing is practically crude) is that they emmit a really high concentration of other gas other than CO2, namely SO2 and NO2. > "SO2 shipping emissions are projected to increase and by 2020 exceed SO2 emissions from all land-based sources such as power plants in the EU, which over the past several decades have been reduced dramatically at great cost to industry." [0] CO2 is obviously our major pollutant but Sulphur dioxide (SO2) is a major green-house gas contributor. The frustrating thing about bunker fuel is that it is used offshore purely because it is cheaper and there is no regulation curbing it. As with almost all things environmental related we go back to the hidden long-term costs of having something cheap in the short-term. [0]https://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/sulphur-marine-fuels https://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/sulphur-ma...

wjnc 6y ago

Oblique mention of Project Drawdown that tries to tackle such questions (albeit at a slightly more abstract level) methodically [1] [1] https://drawdown.org/ https://drawdown.org/

dehrmann 6y ago

Heating, cooling, and transportation probably dominate your personal carbon footprint.

cpach 6y ago
What about eating meat?
- fetbaffe 6y ago
  By removing meat more people would starve. Now that can be a good thing because fewer people means less energy consumption, however you still need to make that moral argument that starvation is an acceptable solution for reducing energy consumption.
  - mac01021 6y ago
    I've missed something. If I stop eating meat then people will starve? Are you talking about the meat farmers?
    - fetbaffe 6y ago
      I’m talking about that the society as a whole will produce less food if we all would go vegan.
      - mac01021 6y ago
        It would be a big change for sure, but maybe less of a problem than you imagine: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-animal-protein-vs-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-an... Also there's the fact that, per calorie, producing beef requires an order of magnitude more arable land than producing <insert-your-favorite-vegetable-here>, since cattle eat so much more than humans do.
        fetbaffe 6y ago

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

The cost of things gives you a reasonable idea of the environmental impact. Energy intensive products and services have to pay for all that fuel. This is why cities produce more CO2 than rural areas. Potentially it is more efficient to live in a city but city dwellers are richer and hence spend and consume more. I went to a talk by the economist Jeffrey Sachs a few years ago where he said the sustainable level of spending around the world was about $10K USD PPP. Not much room for a Tesla in that budget.

higerordermap 6y ago

Yeah no estimate is available for this as of now. But developers continue to write inefficient code even if other consequences are obvious: * If using cloud, often inefficient software will lead to higher expenses than developer time. * On mobile devices battery life is important * On mobile networks bundle sizes matter

CaptArmchair 6y ago

Barring biases for the outlet itself for a moment, Vox did a pretty good video on this issue within the context of electricity consumption. https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430916/2020-presidential-election-climate-change https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430916/2020-presidential-ele... Even policy makers struggle with this. It's very hard to make a comprehensive, understandable model that connects all the dots across the board. So, that's what this piece is about. And here's the actual graph from the video: http://energyliteracy.com/ http://energyliteracy.com/ The argument presented here isn't to reduce consumption - although, in absolute terms, that directly impacts carbon emissions - but to strategically replace fossil fuel sources for clean energy (solar, wind, water,...). It's an interesting perspective because it avoids turning the discussion about "consumption reduction" into a debate about token use cases such as "millions of web pages need to consume less energy." To put it more succinctly, it's more interesting to consider the origin of the electricity coming out of the socket in a datacenter or housing then how it gets used by hardware plugged into those sockets. I'll give you a for instance. Suppose you have to pick a host for your personal website and you're mindful about energy consumption. So, you're considering Digital Ocean: What type of energy is powering their datacenters? Turns out they don't really communicate about that, but intrepid users have figured it out (data februari 2020): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-kind-of-electricity-do-you-run-on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-kind-o... So, if you choose NYC1 as your region when you pick a droplet, that's assumed to be powered by 100% wind energy. Same with people who visit your website. Suppose, in some utopian way, 100% of your visitors have solar, batteries and are off the grid, then their daily visits to your website will have a reduced impact as well. Why reduced and not net-zero? Because the intermediate network infrastructure between NYC1 and, say, a visitor living in California, needs to be powered as well and there's no guarantee traffic won't be handled by fossil fuel powered network nodes at this point in time.

lucian1900 6y ago

Diesel cars have significantly lower carbon emissions than petrol cars and even than some electric car usage when accounting for the energy production. Diesels are even the best placed to run on biofuels. Why single them out?

fyfy18 6y ago
The issue with diesel engines is the fuel does not burn as cleanly in terms of particulate matter. Biodiesel and dinosaur diesel are both the same in this. For the last 15 years or so new diesel cars in Europe have been required to have a diesel particulate filter with the aim of reducing this. Unlike a catalytic converter though, eventually (after 150,000km or so) they will become blocked up and cause a noticeable drop in power or cause engine fault codes. At that point you need to replace it, which could be a few thousand Euro for a new DPF, or the more common option is to remove it. This is illegal in most EU countries, but also a blind eye is turned to it - even in places with strict emissions checks like the UK. AdBlue is a modern way of reducing this even more, but there are already devices you can buy that will trick the ECU into thinking your tank of AdBlue is full when its actually empty. Combined with other common issues like injectors wearing out, as a diesel engine gets old it will burn fuel a lot dirtier than a similar aged petrol engine.
- lucian1900 6y ago
  None of that has anything to do with carbon emissions, which do not increase with poor maintenance (unlike NOx or particulates). And they're all manageable issues, unlike the carbon emissions of petrol engines.
  - fyfy18 6y ago
    That's true, but diesel engines are only really less polluting in terms of CO2 due to using a lower amount of fuel consumed. If your goal is to reduce that, then as you say biofuels are the right answer. However any mass adoption to biofuels would require different engine (existing engines will work fine on a low blend of biofuels, but very few will work on 10P%). For cars, why would you stick with a biodiesel engine which is more complicated and has higher levels of other pollutants, than some sort of biogasoline engine?

nuker 6y ago

> Banning personal vehicle diesel engines Diesel is not worse than petrol: Diesel cars tend to have lower volumetric fuel consumption figures than comparable gasoline vehicles. However, the benefit in terms of CO2 emissions is significantly lower, as the combustion of 1 liter of diesel fuel releases approximately 13% more CO2 than for the same amount of gasoline.

kuu 6y ago
> the combustion of 1 liter of diesel fuel releases approximately 13% more CO2 than for the same amount of gasoline But with a liter of diesel (usually) you can make more kms than with a liter of gasoline. I'm not sure the CO2/km of each class of motor, though
- samoa42 6y ago
  imho both effects stem mostly from the fact that diesel has ~11% higher density than gasoline. (ie. mileage and co2-output become more equal if measured against mass rather than volume)
ctdeneen 6y ago
I believe the issue with diesel is NO2, basically it may emit less but it's worse for us https://www.theengineer.co.uk/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-really-more-polluting-than-petrol-cars/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-rea...
- nuker 6y ago
  > ..it's worse for us Is diesel CO2+NO2 is worse than petrol CO2+NO2 for global warming?
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    Potentially Diesel has less CO2 emissions than Petrol if that is the point you want to insist on. The major issue with Diesel is NO2 emissions, on top of respiratory issues directly attributed to NO2 in city centres, NO2 is also a reducer of human longevity. [0] I would say anything that is slowly killing us and reducing our lifespan should be pretty high on our priorities list. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801524/?report=classic https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801524/?report...