MarkChristopher's Blog

The 450 million vehicles on the road today account for half of the world's total consumption, generate nearly one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions, and have pervasive effects on land use and air quality. Personal transportation (i.e., home use) is responsible for 30 to 50% of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, 33% of toxic water pollution, and over 45% of toxic air emissions. In addition, fueling passenger cars accounts for more than one quarter of world oil consumption.

Building roads for all those cars also creates a lot of environmental problems, fragmenting habitat, consuming resources for their construction, and generating water pollution from runoff. In the U.S., roads and parking lots occupy one half of urban space. That much land, if dedicated to food production, could produce enough grain to feed 200 million people per year.

Light trucks and sports utility vehicles (SUV) are all the rage today, but have severe implications for the environment. The average new light truck or SUV gets lower gas mileage and does not have the same emissions standards as a new passenger car, meaning it will emit more pollutants than a new car.

Of course, there are ways to navigate through our daily lives with less environmental impact while still enjoying the open road- with smarter driving habits, one day our roads could indeed be much more open!

Buy Smart: 

Clean vehicle choices - separating the hybrid from the hype
There are lots of choices of cleaner vehicles to buy these days, but it’s important to remember that not all green cars are created equal. Many hybrid models, such as the Honda Accord, are known as “muscle hybrids” and use the electric motor to achieve horsepower, not efficiency. Others simply stop the engine while idling, accomplishing minimal efficiency gains. There are smart and affordable choices.

Another important consideration in choosing a new car is your driving cycle. Some hybrids, such as the Toyota Prius, actually get better mileage during city driving- perfect for commuters who spend time in heavy traffic.

 

Those who prefer to power their vehicles on something other than gasoline have options too, including the Honda Civic GX, which runs on Compressed Natural Gas and can be refueled at home or at the hundreds of public CNG stations.

 

In addition, most diesel vehicles can run on a biodiesel blend- others can be converted to accommodate purer forms of biodiesel fuel.

• Information on biodiesel fuel  
• Currently available diesel vehicle models

And don’t forget to consider buying a used vehicle- even hybrids and CNG vehicles can be found, saving you money and sparing the Earth the environmental cost of manufacturing another new car- about 27 tons of waste, 4 tons of carbon and 500 lbs. of other pollutants.

 

 

Drive Smart:

 

Even if you’re not in the market to buy a new car, there are things you can do to reduce your pollution impact no matter how you get around your world.

1. Carpool - There is so much extra room in America's 140 million cars that everyone in Western Europe could ride with them. If each commuting car carried just one more person, we'd save more than 18 million gallons of gasoline and keep more than 360 million pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every day.

2. Consolidate your errands –driving 15 fewer miles per week (bike, carpool, walk) eliminates up to 900 lbs. of CO2 per year.

3. Tune Up - clean oil and properly inflated tires eliminate up to 1000 lbs. of CO2 per year per car, and collectively, we can save up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

4. Liberate your driveway - Instead of keeping and maintaining a second vehicle for occasional recreational activities or traveling, rent one on those occasions. For commuting, consider enrolling in a car-sharing program such as Flexcar or Zipcar and give yourself the flexibility of access to a car when you need it and the freedom from it when you don’t. Check out the CarSharing Network for a program near you.

5. Check your right foot…playing Speed Racer is fun, but costly in terms of gasoline efficiency as well as pollution.

6. Tread lightly - Invest in a Terra Pass to offset the CO 2 impact of your driving by funding clean energy projects like wind farms, methane capture and more.

Help form the future:

Just as the last several years brought us hybrid vehicles, several promising automotive and fuel technologies are just on the horizon:

Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) - Often described as “an electric vehicle with a safety net”, PHEVs offer the best of both worlds: the ability to use electricity for your daily commute, and a gasoline hybrid system for longer distances. Using this technology, vehicles will have the ability to achieve the equivalent of over 100mpg, and a PHEV with even 20 miles of electric range would reduce gasoline consumption by 60%.

While no automakers are yet manufacturing Plug-In Hybrids, innovative companies have created kits that will be available to convert existing hybrids to PHEVs. For more information, check out EDrive or Hymotion.

Flexible-Fuels - today, most of the fuel for our cars is petroleum-based, but there are several innovations with regard to ethanol and renewable diesel, both of which will eventually be made from waste products and can be integrated into existing fueling infrastructure and vehicle technologies. These fuels are currently being manufactured in pilot programs and will available in various cities nationwide over the next several years.

In order to see these technologies in a showroom near you, it’s important to ask our automakers to build better cars as well as vote for and support the policymakers that uphold your values.