Cars!

Not necessarily so - petrol cars also emit particulates, and as they are now discovering, they are so small that these particulates are so small (micro-particulates) that they are harder to filter, harder to detect, yet get into the body easier.

True - but then that is down to the user, and not the technology. You can sell someone a box of paracetamol and give them the instructions how to use them, but yet some people still manage to accidentally overdose.......

It is not necessarily to do with road speed, it is actually to do with engine speed, and more importantly engine temperature. The exhaust gases coming out of the engine have to be above a given temperature for the regeneration process to take place. The heat generated by the regeneration process is huge, therefore it is also not a good idea to allow it to happen when the car is stationary (unless this is controlled in some way), for no other reason than it has the potential to ignite grass and debris, or melt a road surface - - inhibiting this process from happening when the car is below a given speed means that you can guarantee sufficient ambient airflow to prevent anything catching fire.

One cry that we currently hear is about the horrendous cost of replacing the DPF when it fails; fair comment, as they are a lot of money; BUT - remember when catalytic converters were new technology? They were eye-wateringly expensive, and also had a similarly huge scrap value which led to them being cut off cars in the middle of the night...... Now, they are commonplace and not all that expensive.

Have any of those solutions proved to be effective in the real world? And what of the inherent dangers that come along with the technology? I am lucky enough to have a driveway, but I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with 30-amps at 240v floating about outside in the middle of a howling storm. Sure, the manufacturers will take various steps to make the plugs and sockets waterproof and durable - - but these things can and do fail. How many house fires are caused by faulty wiring? How many people use extension cables without checking them for cuts/damage? Imagine the fallout if 82 year old Mrs Jones gets electrocuted by stepping into a puddle whilst walking down the street simply because some irresponsible eejit has mishandled their charge cable and it is damaged......

For me, the whole situation is currently MASSIVELY imbalanced - in decades past, few people would listen about the dangers and harm to the environment caused by the advancement of cars and machines; now, those who are (rightly) concerned with the environment are being listened to and are positively foaming at the mouth - - a lot of what they say is absolutely correct, but a lot of it is pure and simple over-reaction.

We DO have to take notice of what we are doing to our planet, and we DO have to take every step possible to have our air as clean as it possibly can be. However, there are much bigger environmental issues that, if solved, would have much more of a positive impact - not least:

- Plastics, and how we dispose of them. We are currently seeing this all the time in the news, and the damage is massive. Not only do we need to massively reduce the plastics used in packaging (I know I would be happy with a fraction of the packaging that comes with things), and this should be mandated to force the manufacturers. Not enough has been made of corn-starch films which would protect most things for sufficient time to get them from manufacturer to consumer, but then subsequently compost in a relatively short space of time.

- MASSIVE ships carrying stuff all over the world. How in the name of the wee man does it make sense to have oil dragged out of the earth in Russia, sent to the UK to be refined into plastic pellets, then shipped to China to be made into whatever product to then be shipped back to the UK to be sold to us (only to break the second time you use it!); the fuel consumption of these ships is stated in TONS per HOUR!

- FOOD! Why are we importing milk from the likes of Poland? The vast bulk of this country is empty space - why are we not growing our own food here in the UK, have our own farmers supported to produce what we need instead of relying on the rest of the world to ship it in to us?

- Nice as they are, cruise ships are also massively guilty of pollution; as a ball park figure, they use 80,000 litres per day. Sure, that can be made into a statistic by dividing it by the number of heads on board to give a per-passenger consumption figure, but no matter how you cut it, it is still 80,000 litres of fuel per day - and a lot of the time when they are sailing people on board are shopping, watching cabaret, eating, drinking and playing casino games..... ALL of which can be done on land. At least a plane such as the A380 works out to give a figure of over 90 miles per gallon per passenger......


I could go on, and on (I already have, sorry!), but I am sure you will agree that ALL of the above demonstrates that we are all being taken for a ride in the name of the environment, whilst the environment is suffering more and more​

 

Vote @Fat Controller for Prime Minister.

You've got my vote.

 

Money, sharp dealing, corruption, tax and politics make the world go round.

Wait a minute!!! Aren't all those words synonyms?

 

The latest proposal from the Government, Sandy, is, because they are losing revenue from cleaner cars, they're thinking of introducing a Toll of so much a mile on vehicles. They're eyeing up the Transport Vehicles first with a "view" to put the Toll on cars if it "works".

 

Because they were forced to meet a set of standards, rapidly, that were essentially meaningless in the real world.

Back in the mid to late 90's, VW made a 1.9 PD engine - they were quite literally bomb-proof, but admittedly did chuck out a shed load of reek when booted, and many of them went on and on for many hundreds of thousands of miles. Then, the powers that be got involved and stated that all engines had to meet X, Y and Z in emissions standards within a year or so (a small amount of time in development terms) - so, the engineers set about meeting those specifics and redesigned the engine with new oil pump drives, different injectors, and modified electronics, whilst at the same time trying to retain the sheer grunt that this engine had (and was loved for) - they had no concerns about things like NOX, as they were simply not tested to any degree, it was almost purely CO2. The net result was the BKP engine which rapidly gained fame for numerous faults, not least injector failures that could see your car very suddenly lose all power (it happened to me, thankfully I was in the nearside lane at the time, and was able to get off the road quite easily) as the engine would quite literally just instantaneously shut down. Oil pump drive failures would destroy engines and turbo failures would do the same, plastic inlet manifolds (to save weight, to help meet the emissions standards) would crack and fail requiring replacement assemblies - - - they were a bloomin' nightmare of an engine.

The engine that followed (CAGA) was a much, much more refined and reliable beast as there had been a few years development to allow things to catch up.

This was not isolated to VW by the way, almost all manufacturers had some sort of issue. BMW for example had engines ingesting swirl flaps, destroying engines. A destroyed engine in a car over 6 years old, is generally a death-knell for most folks, as they will not pay to have it replaced, such is the costs involved.

The whole problem is, that by imposing (unrealistic) specifications, and at the same time pushing diesel as being the panacea, all in a very short space of time essentially led to a lot of the problems we are seeing now. No time was allowed for proper engineering and development.

Let's not forget, that within my lifetime cars have gone from machines that you would actually (and I have genuinely done this in the early days) do a full service on before making a journey of a couple of hundred miles, a good heater was a real attribute, traction control and brake force distribution was solely down to your right foot, and that you had an extremely high chance of death or serious deformation if you hit anything at over 25 mph and a 2-litre engine was considered to be the ducks guts if you got 105 or 110-bhp from it, to complex machines that have dual-zone climate controls, sat-nav, anti-lock braking, traction control, trace control, lane departure warnings, autonomous braking radar, airbags, electronic brake force distribution.... the list goes on and on..... oh, and now you can have 150-bhp from a 1-litre turbocharged engine that only wants to see a workshop every 10,000 miles rather than every 6,000 miles.

Things have moved on MASSIVELY - - idiots, who foam at the mouth demanding solutions to problems NOW, rather than waiting for a thoroughly thought out and tested solution, well they should be shot.

 

Although they have been improved enormously diesel is still, by far, the bigger producer of SOA (Secondary Organic Aerosol) which is a major cause of harmful particulate pollutants. There have been considerable improvements in the filtering since the initial report (National Academy of Science) came out in 2012 showing diesel to be 15 times more polluting but the, yet to be, new figures expect it to show that it has dropped to three to four times as polluting (my cousin heads up one of the research groups about it at an American university).

He says there are many other factors involved but the advancement in diesel research is rapidly closing the gap - but governments are too slow (his comment was closer to 'thick as two short planks') to take notice.

 

And by far, the biggest producers of those SOA's are the shipping industry - yet we do nothing about it. Let's also not forget the particulates that are spewed out by aviation; until I moved here, I would not have believed the stuff that falls to earth from the planes overhead - if I do not keep up with pressure washing our patios, they end up with black stains all over them which is solely particulates from Heathrow's finest.

A 747 will munch its way through (roughly) 150.000 litres of fuel on a ten hour flight. That is enough fuel to power my car for 2142 MONTHS (178.5 YEARS!) Give or take, it will burn its way through (roughly) 4000 litres just getting off the ground - that would power my car for 57 months - nearly 5 years!

.........so, tell me again how my wee 1.5 diesel is killing the environment?

 

Definitely not! But they say that the 1.25 billion motors on the roads are contributing somewhat to the problem

Will I give up my gas guzzler? Not on your Nellie!

 

Some years ago I did a similar calculation with regards to flying on holiday or staying at home and going for trips out. It also came out in favour of flying but I wasn't able to calculate the different effect of car fuel to plane fuel.

 

Ah, the art of statistics....

I'm actually not against aviation, or shipping as such, but there is far too much of it that is absolutely needless. We have the space, and used to have the skills (and should do again, in my opinion) to produce our own milk, butter, vegetables, wood and even coal (to name but a very few) - yet we ship them in from Poland, New Zealand, Turkey, Russia, Australia.....

If, our elected elite were to actually CARE about our country, and CARE about the environment, and NOT be scared of big businesses, there are some changes that at a simplistic level would utterly transform this country:

- Housing, lots of it, prefabricated placed on plots with gardens and green space to be rented by local authorities to anyone

- NHS, stop all the 'nice to have' procedures such as gender-reassignment, or at least for those type of procedures charge for them in the same way that a private healthcare provider would

- Rebuild our farming industry and get make the current waste levels illegal; the amount of food that is wasted just because it is the wrong shape etc is absolutely criminal. Farmers should be supported in selling all of their produce, and contracts that tie them to one customer only (looking at you, Tesco!) should be banned.

- Make importing foods that we can produce here a thing of the past (be it by import taxes or bans); lets produce them here instead.

- Forestry; we have spent decades decimating the forests and woodlands, despite the fact that the wood can be used for so many applications (construction, paper, cardboard and even fuel!); we have filtration technology available now that allows us to burn things with virtually no smoke emitted, so surely wood could be part of a renewable energy scheme?

- Increase the teaching of basic skills such as cooking etc in our schools; why do we spend vast swathes of time teaching algebra etc when our children are leaving schools unable to cook proper food?

- Bring back our engineering skills; we built some of the best planes and trains in the world, yet now we are buying them from abroad..... what in the name of the wee man is that all about?

- Build the relevant infrastructures to generate enough energy for the country to be self-sufficient. We do not make enough use of hydro-electric or nuclear in my opinion.

- Nationalise public transport, all of it. If we want people to stop using cars, give them a reliable and meaningful alternative, but don't expect it to run at a profit. Some train lines or bus routes will always bring in more revenue than they cost to run, because they are so busy - - rather than that higher revenue being profit, use it to offset the cost of running that trainline or bus route to the more rural locations.

We will never see any of this though, as there is far too much corruption in the world, and the people who have all the money would never allow it to happen.