I’m curious, especially growing up with a parent who never understood the point. Do/did you use your vehicle for transport or for storage of these items? Said parent ended up carting around loads of deadweight around that they never actually used…
My golf clubs and trolley are always in the back (I use them 4 times a week), along with a small selection of tools in case of breakdown/flat tyre.
In a standard car, even a large one, that would leave little room for anything else.
Perhaps in the T3 but there are bigger fish to fry. This is translated from Dutch. The article is written by the NOS, the Dutch BBC. People may not like Konstantin Kisin but he is not talking BS
Wednesday, August 10, 2022, 8:00 PM
Methane satellite finds garbage dump with climate impact of 1.5 million carsResearchers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research use a satellite to search for large methane leaks around the world. A rubbish dump in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has been found to emit tens of tons of methane per hour, comparable to the climate impact of one and a half million cars.
The researchers also point to garbage dumps in India and Pakistan as major emitters. The results of their research have been published today in Science Advances.
Reducing methane emissions is the quickest way to mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the short term.
Manfredi Caltagirone, Head of International Methane Emissions Observatory
The research team used the Dutch satellite Tropomi to identify high-emission cities. Buenos Aires (Argentina), Delhi (India), Lahore (Pakistan) and Mumbai (India) stood out. Emissions there are on average twice as high as previous estimates based on global inventories.“When we then zoomed in with a high-resolution satellite, we saw that there were rubbish dumps in those four cities that are responsible for a large part of those emissions,” says SRON researcher Bram Maasakkers.
The garbage dump in Buenos Aires emits 28 tons of methane per hour, the three other dumps account for three, six and 10 tons of methane per hour respectively. That equates to the impact of another 130,000 to 500,000 cars.
European Space Agency
A visualization of the Tropomi satellite in space
“On the one hand, there is great excitement about the opportunities this technique brings,” said Manfredi Caltagirone, the head of the United Nations’ International Methane Emissions Observatory. “On the other hand, this discovery also gives cause for concern because it provides additional evidence for the magnitude of the problem.”Methane is an almost thirty times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. After CO2, methane is the gas with the largest contribution to climate change: it causes about a quarter of the current warming.
Worrying, but there is also hope. Methane only remains in the atmosphere for a relatively short time, so the amount would drop quickly if we emitted less of it. That is therefore “the quickest way to mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the short term,” says Caltagirone.
“If we cut methane emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2030, we could reduce global warming by a third degree Celsius by 2040. In climate terms, that is huge. to avoid the worst effects of climate change."
Reduce emissions
The first step to reduce emissions from the landfills would be to reduce the waste produced, says SRON researcher Bram Maasakkers. “Then you can ensure that this organic waste does not end up in landfills, but is used for compost or to produce biogas. And finally, you can capture methane by working with cover and an installation that captures the methane gas.”
Argentina and Pakistan are among more than 100 countries that signed the United Nations’ Global Methane Pledge last year. In doing so, they committed themselves to reducing methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, although no binding agreements have been included in the pact. India did not sign.
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Pickup trucks are great - and there are loads of people who absolutely need them. But there is a healthy population of posers who really don’t, and barely use their capacity - yet complain about the cost of fuel.
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Also important to note the considerable expansion in size of these monster trucks in recent years. These two trucks are probably about 15 years apart in age, but the size of the bed and storage capacity are the same
It is difficult to explain how much more dangerous these modern mega trucks are than regular sized vehciles, both in terms of the lack of visibility they provide (despite lots of non-tradespeople picking them because they feel they have better visibility from higher up) and the lethality of any collision.
They are a monstrosity that need to be dealt with.
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Never quite got that. Drive a big engined car = higher fuel bills, suck it up.
Don’t think I’ve ever picked a petrol station based on their prices at the pump, even when I had my 5L V10 Audi
I work on the basis that if you can afford to buy it, you can afford to run it
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I think this is very much a confirmation bias thing.
No one who is concerned about the whole issue of global warming is dismissing the significance of methane, quite the opposite. The very fact that researchers have thought to look for such leaks and the article is covering it suggests that it’s something that concerns quite a few people.
Now I don’t remember precisely what Kisin said about this, having watched it the first time it was posted by @sandsoftime and not bothered about it after, but if I recall correctly (and my memory is rather fallible in this regard), his arguments were along the lines of developing countries needing to do more, and technology.
Neither of which are wrong, but they’re also insufficient, which is the main problem. I think, or I’d like to think, the reason why Kisin is being dismissed is that (a) he doesn’t really care about the problem, and is just paying lip service to the problem while trying to blame in on “woke culture” or whatever right-wing (it’s hard to characterise, but I’m not referring to those with conservative political beliefs, but those who engage actively in the culture and the bullshit that goes along with it) bogeyman du jour, and (b) the way he’s framing it is only of interest to the people who want to engage in that culture war bullshit.
I can’t be arsed to care about someone like Kisin, because the impression that I got from the video is simply that he’s yet another right-wing grifter like Peterson or Carlson who doesn’t actually contribute anything to actual conservative political intellectual/philosophical development. They’re just agitators full of hot air who seek to profit off the outrage they generate, rather than actually doing anything to further the cause of supposed conservative values.
People really need to stop worshipping such grifters, and start thinking about what the actual values they care about are, and how they can be developed. For the record, this last statement isn’t even about right-wingers, but the population at large. Too often we confuse stands on particular issues/emotive reactions to them for actual values, and this does not help political discourse in any way whatsoever.
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Yes, but you’re presupposing that most people actually go through that thought process, or anything resembling a thought process.
Not really, and not interested in “most people”.
If they buy it and cant afford to run it, they’ll have to get rid of it, or have it taken off them.
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I was just explaining people who complain about the cost of fuel while buying heavy vehicles they don’t actually need.
Not a lot of thinking goes into such purchases alarmingly often, and it’s mostly picked on gut feel. I’ve always liked cars, but I cannot fit one into my lifestyle in a way that makes sense cost-wise, so I reduce my kicks to renting one every now and then (read a week a year). But many people are emotionally tied into their purchases even though they cannot justify the costs.
In what way?
It’s a common rhetorical approach of those who are not actually interested in solving problems. It is essentially…
“You say you are concerned about x and so doing y. Well what about z? Why are you doing nothing about z (uh, we are). Is because you dont really care about x, but are just doing it for attention [replace with any motivation the right wing for why anyone would want to do anything good]”
It’s the go to tactic of those who think the status quo is best protected by obfuscation, typical of paid industry talking heads It’s a variation on the “Gish Gallopp”. But it is also a rhetorical device used by people whose identity is as the smartest person in the room so they have to pretend they see holes in the way “experts” think about things to knock down expertise in favour of elevating their own opinion.
You dont need to have actually listed to the climate bit to get this, given it was so completely projected as his rhetorical approach with his treatment of “wokism”. It is all just so pathetically transparent.
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It’s a fair comment to say that lots of people have large pick up trucks, or SUVs and it is mostly as a vanity thing, and not a necessity. And as such, damaging for the climate, given the quantity of vehicles.
Some people have such vehicles and it is necessary. As an individual example, a good friend of mine is a surgeon. We get crap weather here. He drives a meaty SUV in the winter months to make sure he can always get to the hospital as he is often on call.
On the face of it, it is a waste - one person, five seats, and not very fuel efficient.
But I completely understand the thinking.
But you don’t need an SUV to navigate the difficult winter weather.
On that basis, people in your bracket should be driving around in a VW Polo then?
No idea. I tend to believe in incentives (or disincentives) over out right restrictions where possible, but disincentives to consumers probably wouldnt work because they are already expensive to purchase and operate. You’d have to find ways for manufacturers to be incentivized to stop making them. I dont know what that would look like, I just know we’d collectively be better off if the entire super sized non-commercial truck was no longer on the market
Opinions vary
Is the vehicle you seem to be advocating for of the modern north american massively oversied variety? Where the increase in size and weight is massively disproportionate to its functional capacity? I thought these were a fairly uniquely north american model.
These large pickups are also a political statement. They are meant to express anger. Look up “rolling coal.” The auto manufacturers have gradually redesigned their pickups to market in this direction.
Smaller UK version.
But regardless of location, the opposition to them often comes across as snobbery and should be directed more at drivers in general than vehicles that dont match peoples taste.
I’ve come across way more dickhead drivers on the road in hot hatches than pick ups