Thread: Going to email Greta

I haven't reviewed all the scientific literature or anything about this, but a quick 'google' revealed

Just a moment...

The summary is a 'news' article was

"The results reveal that if car owners keep their vehicles on the road 10 percent longer before sending them to the scrapyard, the overall carbon footprint of cars would decrease by 30.7 million tons. That’s the equivalent of a one-percent decrease in CO2 emissions. Researchers say the reason of this is manufacturing new vehicles actually produces more greenhouse gases than continuing to drive existing cars — even if they use gasoline."

As someone who is keen to contribute to reducing my environmental footprint where possible, I often wonder about these things given my cars are 22 and 25 years old respectively. Would be keen to hear if the overall weight of scientific evidence is that they should be scrapped.

Seems this is at least contested ...

Buying A New Car Is Greener Than Driving An Old One...Really

There are plenty of opinions on this owe

The latest German report said that operating a diesel vehicle produced less pollution than an electric one based on the current and near term electric grid

The site quoted above is part of a car sales group so not sure how independent the content is. Plenty of advertorial sites dressed up as independent authorities

Most reports are based on the wheel to wheel not full life cycle. Reason is the question is too hard to answer with any certainty as when you look into it is actually a very complicated supply chain

Wheel to wheel or tail pipe measurement is due to government only being interested in pollution in cities. When I suggested that on a user pays principal the power station should be based closest to the biggest user was told this was not to be considered as it would put it in the middle of the city which was politically unacceptable

The other obvious variable is how many kilometres the vehicle is driven.

Many vehicles do way below the average annual mileage, and pretty obviously, if they are replaced with a new vehicle the manufacturing emissions per year are a far larger proportion of their attributable emissions. Of course if you argue that they last a lot longer, it evens out. But this argument is suspect as well - economic life of vehicles is more often than not limited by the availability of parts or deterioration due to time rather than mileage, so it is not reasonable to suggest that a vehicle doing half the annual distance will last twice as long.