I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....

The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck.

I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable.

When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows.

My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.

There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity.

Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per-person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs).

As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject.

There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.

At times I wonder how much of the truck/SUV critique is really driven by environmental concerns. I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous. And I've raged at trucks and SUVs whose regular headlights completely blinded me because they're set two feet higher than a normal car's. That makes me wonder how many people are enraged about those vehicles but frame their critiques in environmental terms because you can't yell at someone you know because someone else who drives the same vehicle pissed you off, but you can yell at them about a more generalized harm like environmental pollution....

Not to mention how much worse it would be to end up in an accident with one of them.

Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for anything.

I understand the point you are trying to make (energy consumption is an aggregate quantity so cannot be derived from instantaneous measurement), but of course it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car, and there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Sadly, it is often the over-bearing extremists that cause progress to be made.

Increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles is not something that can be achieved by will alone; it also requires the cooperation of physics.

First, the SUV could quite likely already do 50mpg if driven by a hypermiler, and maybe fitted with truck tires and a streamlining tail. But it would take twice as long to get back from the deer hunt, and it would be a bumpier and much less comfortable ride.

At a given speed with a given frontal area in a given density of air, though, you're really limited by how low you can get the drag coefficient, and at any speed you're limited by how low you can get the mass and rolling resistance.

On this subject, I highly recommend Chapter A, "Cars II", of Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/2...

That's partly true. But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.

Back in the 70's such folk agitated for the CAFE regulations governing fleet fuel efficiency. It's important to note that these standards applied to passenger cars, as they quite clearly cannot be applied to 18-wheelers.

We got cars of greater efficiency, and one of the changes that led to this was the demise of large family station wagons. However, the consumers still wanted a way to drag around their families. This led to the evolution of the minivan, and eventually to the SUV.

While I don't have nearly enough data to know whether the net effect was positive, it's clear that at least at the margin, the effect of the CAFE regulations was negative.

You can't fool the market. It always finds a way to route around obstacles.

You have some interesting speculation here but no evidence at all.

Growing up my family had a station wagon and a regular sedan. They had comparable gas mileage IIRC. I think station wagons were driven out of the market (heh) in part because people felt safer and more powerful in SUVs and when you're driving your family around, safety matters. I certainly knew a lot of people who got SUVs for hauling the family around specifically because the high altitude made them feel invincible and they assumed that the extra weight would help in crashes against smaller vehicles.

Subsequently, I've seen a couple sources which corroborate this trend -- in high speed accidents between cars and SUVs the fatality rates where higher than two cars.

And you follow this assertion with more speculation without evidence. Interesting...

I've never really understood why people get worked up over landfills. Digging a giant hole and filling it with trash is a perfectly rational solution. It isn't as if we're importing mass from space and converting it to trash...we're digging up stuff from the ground, using it for awhile, and then putting it back in a slightly different form. If we ever find a use for the styrofoam in landfills, we can mine it back out again.

"More recently, it has been recognized that this landfill gas represents a usable energy source. The methane can be extracted from the gas and used as fuel. In the North Wake County Landfill, a company collects the landfill gas, extracts the methane, and sells it to a nearby chemical company to power its boilers."

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...

Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.

In other policy areas, we've decided that an issue is important enough and should be taken out of the realm of personal virtue and placed into the realm of social action. My brother is disabled. He doesn't have to go around begging for coins so that he can eat this month. There's no opportunity for you to demonstrate your personal virtue by donating cash to him. Instead, we've all decided that seriously disabled people shouldn't have to go around begging to survive, so everyone is going to have a chunk of cash taken from their paycheck used to cover Social Security Disability Insurance. We lose a bit of cash, but in exchange we get to live in a society where severely disabled people don't die on the street because they can't work. We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.

We should do the same thing with climate change. Greenhouse gases are bad. So put a tax on them and let the market find a way to reduce them. Then we won't have to harass random people who make lifestyle choices we don't like; instead, people will make choices that in aggregate are more effective at mitigating climate change. In the story above, the truck driving apartment dweller would have more cash to spend than the car driving McMansion dweller, which will be far more effective in getting the McMansion dweller to change her behavior than any amount of lecturing, no matter how technically correct it is.

Trading sanctimony and self-righteousness for policy effectiveness seems like a huge win to me.

I'm glad that your brother is now able to live a more rewarding life without having to degrade himself or wonder where his next meal is coming from.

On the other hand, I'm sad that as a society, we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue. In some ways, I can no longer be as virtuous as I might like: I have less money to give because it's been taxed away from me to give to others; or I've got less time to give, because my time is dedicated to earning that money that is being taken from me.

I have no evidence to support this, but I sometimes wonder if the fact that so much of virtue is taken away from us, that we're not in the habit of being virtuous, and that in turn makes it more difficult for us to make bigger overtures. Just a thought...

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will. Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

Really? I do not see any evidence for this intent anywhere. Certainly, the point of SSDI is not exclusively the removal of an opportunity for personal virtue. There is also the fact that everyone here is one car accident and brain injury away from being incapable of working or caring for themselves. And while some people will purchase disability insurance, some will not and those people will become a drain on the public purse. Better, both in moral terms and in economic efficiency to make everyone pay for a baseline insurance package.

More to the point, there is nothing stopping you from volunteering to help the disabled or anyone else. SSDI provides a minimal standard of living, but we all prefer to live on more than the absolute minimum. There is more to life than a small monthly check can possibly provide, so there is ample opportunity for you to express your virtue by helping disabled people.

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will.

I think you're conflating morality and law. The law compels your behavior. It cannot make you moral. There is no law against being a bigot or even saying bigoted things per se.

Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

As I understand it, hate speech is only a crime in the US when it occurs in conjunction with a systemic campaign of discrimination or a violent crime. I'd say that if the only thing keeping you from launching into long diatribes about how various racial groups are genetically inferior (while either discriminating against them or assaulting/murdering one of their members) is the possibility of legal sanction, then you are not actually a virtuous person. And this lack of virtue really cannot be blamed on society. Or the law.

Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.

If these people actually cared about the environment they'd buy a used car, or bike to work.

I must disagree.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not poking fun at you per se, but the idea that our technology will 'always' trend toward more efficient engines is one that we've pretty much failed at until very recently, which is still arguable.

But on the other hand, building a new car requires lots of energy, so maybe in the end we're better off driving old ones... ? It's all so complex, I don't know what to think, personally!

So to a very close first approximation: MPG = carbon emission per mile = greenhouse impact per mile.

Indeed, a more polluting vehicle (say a really dirty old diesel engine) would if anything have less of an effect on the greenhouse. Since it's particulate emissions would promote an offsetting cooling effect.

So no, it is not all CO2, but the rest is a rounding error.

If you're cared about pollution aside from that then yes, there are huge differences depending on make, model, maintenance, etc.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_va...)

It was also mostly made out of aluminium, much to the chagrin of my parents / loved ones.

It's also worth noting that many 80's cars got very good gas mileage. My first car, an '86, got low 30's, and with a tune-up some owners got higher than 35. So, be wary of the studies you read comparing new car mpg to old car mpg. My car got better or equal gas mileage compared to everything but hybrids like the Prius and Insight, and those are not representative of modern cars. I would bet the studies you have been reading have been comparing Insights (70mpg, and actually made since 1999) to 80's Corvettes (14mpg) or something along those lines.

states that direct tailpipe emission of CO2 accounts for 68% of the average vehicle lifecycle carbon emissions, with 21 percent linked to production and delivery of fuel, and 11 percent are due to manufacturing, including materials production."

So 11%. Pretty far off.

Two completely different things!

It'll take a very very long time to recoup that.

The only way to effectively reduce carbon emissions on the production side is to drive less person-miles. Buying used or new doesn't change much.

Citation? I don't think I've ever lived somewhere that accepted styrofoam in curbside recycling, so I'm a bit skeptical.

However I just looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_cup#Environmental_impact which has the comment, Paper cups may consume more non-renewable resources than cups made of polystyrene foam (whose only significant effluent is pentane). which includes two citations for the fact.

The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home.

edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.

In any case the guy in the conversation wasn't the wannabe environmentalist. He just didn't like being harassed about the impact of his lifestyle choices by a hypocrite who was demonstrably far less environmentally friendly. (But who thought she was doing her bit.)

In other word it was a standard beam/mote discussion.

Bergen has seen a boom in percentage of trips made by bike since they instituted a program to make the city more friendly to that mode of transportation.

Cities being designed around the automobile are by far the biggest thing standing in the way of the uptake of everyday cycling, not the weather.

Some Minnesotans fly to Arizona every winter to avoid the icy streets here. They are called "snowbirds" locally. I used to think that was an extravagant lifestyle, but when my dad was not quite seventy-two years old, in April in Minnesota, he slipped on ice while on a trip to the local grocery store and then was paralyzed (quadriplegic) for the last six years of life, unable to care for himself at all. Since then, I have taken icy streets much more seriously. I still bike a lot, and I still stay in Minnesota during the winter, but I realize now that walking or biking on ice can have catastrophic consequences.

I agree with the idea that designing a city to be more bike-friendly increases bike trips. I enjoy where I live now because my city has an extensive set of city bike trails (which in the winter are sometimes used by Nordic skiers) that connect to regional trails (former railroad lines) that extend all over our metropolitan area. But I watch out for ice for half of each year.

Anyway, aside from those two cities the main reason people don't cycle has been shown time and time again to be lack of infrastructure, not the weather. Just look at other places with the same climate as The Netherlands, or Bergen. Clearly the common factor isn't the weather.

It's also a much bigger factor than people imagine. I've lived in Iceland which often has these sort of glassy ice conditions an -5 °C, and I'd much prefer it to otherwise equivalent weather at 20 °C somewhere else.

The cold allows you to push harder without being sweaty, and I've found that in mixed terrain cycling on ice with studded tires is a lot safer than on no ice. It's a lot easier to slip on loose gravel than it is to slip on ice when your tires have a dozen nails sticking into the ice.

Edit: The parent pointed out that Minneapolis was one of the top cycling cities in the US with around 4-5% of trips made by bike (compared to Europe's 2% average, 10% for Austria & Germany, and >20% for the Netherlands and Denmark). Then deleted the comment for some reason.

P.S. Yeah, I know you Canadians have it rough, I feel for you.

Actually I grew up in Victoria, BC. The climate there is very mild for similar reasons to why much of Europe is. I didn't experience nasty weather until I moved to New Hampshire.

There is a fair amount of cyclists here, but not that many ride in the winter.

She was vegan for a bit which I suppose might count for a little, then her therapist told her it was OK to eat meat so she started again...

In terms of energy consumption alone, semiconductor manufacturing uses about 10^6 as much energy as metal craft, or 10^7 the one needed for plastics injection (per weight of finished product). Other key measures such as water consumption and pollution are in the same ballpark.

OF course, electronic gadgets are mostly made out of plastic pieces, and ICs are only a tiny fraction of the total weight, which is way we don't pay thousands of dollars for a cell phone. But the size of an object is normally not a good predictor of its environment impact.

A more accurate measure would be the retail price, but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium. You can do that by using the price of the cheapest competitor instead. This has the advantage of taking into account the energy needed for shipping and storage as well.

You don't have to take this into account, as the distortion just becomes more pollution. Chances are the brand premium ends up in the pockets of marketing and execs, who spend it. Any* time money is spent it eventually "generates" an equivalent amount of pollution.

* Assuming all regulations are equally applied to all manufactures.

The purpose of using the price as an indicator is to roughly estimate the inputs required to manufacture a product. Under that assumption, profit margins are noise.

Of course, profits are eventually expended, but so are the cost paid to suppliers, the taxes and so on. You would have to think about velocity of money and the overall macroeconomic effect. This is way overkill.

If you want this taken to the logical extreme, see http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf where it is argued that "using dollars = spending gasoline". As oil is the cheapest available energy source, everything eventually becomes oil burnt.

There are lots of crazy or ignorant people in the world who say crazy or ignorant stuff. It doesn't necessarily make sense to ascribe every self-described environmentalist's claims to all environmentalists. This seems like the real world version of nut-picking.