This is just insane. Not only are cars themself mostly unnecessary, if the right infrastructure is provided, but SUVs also use more resources to run and be produced then small cars, without any advantage over them. So an obvious waste, which could easily be cut to reduce emissions.
Source IEA: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/suvs-are-setting-new-sales-records-each-year-and-so-are-their-emissions
Now do it with container ships
Bunker fuel burns clean I swear!
SUVs also use more resources to run and be produced *than small cars, without any advantage over them.
Says someone who has never needed to haul cargo to and some a venue before.
Other than hauling an actual SUV full of cargo, I agree it’s mostly a waste.
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.
Dodge Grand Caravan. Stow and Go is a life saver. Fuel economy is decent if you keep up with maintenance.
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.
Both your comment and edit were snarky. Let’s just be nice.
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.
without any advantage over them
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?
Intentional or not, it’s an exaggeration. Only a sith deals in absolutes!
This is just insane
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/07/un-expert-human-rights-climate-crisis-economy
Outgoing special rapporteur David Boyd says ‘there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand how grave this is’
There are three levels of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics…
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If we’re naming modes of transportation that pollute, it would be remiss not to point out the worst one: ships.
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.)
Na, bring back the golden age of sail. Ideally with automation… and automation sea shanties
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 tonnage1 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.
If you could eliminate 80% of fuel costs you could make smaller vessels much more cost effective
Ships don’t work that way. There are a couple of reasons other than fuel economy why they keep building them as big as they can:
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Hull speed is proportional to waterline length. In other words, bigger ships can go faster.
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Bigger ships have better economies of scale for the crew.
Also, winds aren’t reliable enough for any ship to sail 95% of the time, unless you count being becalmed as “sailing.”
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That’s honestly a very fair point.
You could combine all motorsports into one bar and it still wouldn’t register
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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.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding this but weren’t the SUVs already calculated in the countries’ bars? Of course something globally combined that burns fuel is going to be significant. I imagine sedans and coupes wouldn’t be very far behind. This smacks of a “Statistically, everyone has one testicle” type of thing.
Are we just picking out things that we can add to the graph? Like, can I choose farts or barbques?
Agreed. I’d love to also see how this was calculated, but the graph doesn’t make me want to click on the link tbh.
My (and hopefully most other’s too) hatred for SUV’s is already maxxed out anyway.
Can we show the emissions from industries like plastics?
This.
Not for the sake of being green… but for the fact that plastic is a endocrine disruptor, we’re phasing out all things plastic for glass as best we can.
Fk plastic.
This is such a difficult thing to do. Replaced baggies with reusable silicone. Use only glass or ceramic dishes. Use reusable bags at the grocery store. Got little reusable fruit and vegetable bags so I’m not using the disposable bags at the grocery.
But at the end of the day, goddamn every food or product I buy comes wrapped in plastic one way or the other, and there’s little I can do about that.
Say you remove SUVs from the other countries’ calculations. That would make SUVs look even worse.
Or perhaps you begin arbitrarily counting other things twice in your calculations. Then they look better.
My point isn’t that item X doesn’t pollute, just that the graph in question is less useful in it’s nature and aimed at being alarmist.
Examples?
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding this but weren’t the SUVs already calculated in the countries’ bars?
I was responding to this comment. If you remove the SUVs’ calculations from other bars then the others get smaller relative to SUVs and make SUVs look worse.
Or perhaps you begin arbitrarily counting other things twice in your calculations. Then they look better.
They either kept SUVs in or they didn’t. If they kept them in (counted twice) It makes SUVs look less polluting (see above). If they didn’t count them twice then it would be more accurate and make SUVs look more polluting.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether they counted SUVs twice or not because it doesnt make their calculations “look better”.
I don’t see it as alarmist at all. Rather, it’s demonstrating how much emissions come from SUVs. As seen by other comments on this post, it sparks dialogue about less carbon intensive alternatives to SUVs which are exceedingly common.
That’s kind of the point. People naturally imagine that there are much greater contributions and that there’s no way a minor choice like an SUV over a compact has major consequences. But this graph does demonstrate that such a decision matters.
Good point. I wonder how big of a bar “meat production” would be. If you include shipping and all other ways it contributes to emissions I wouldn’t be surprised if it outweighs consumer vehicles.
