For all our posturing and advertising and gallant attempts by car companies to reinvent themselves as leaders in energy efficient technology, the United States is in a positively pathetic place when it comes to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from cars.
Want proof? Just take a look at our results compared to the rest of the developed world. For the first quarter of 2010, the U.S. emissions rate was 255.6 grams per kilometer for light vehicles. Which is downright depressing next to Japan’s emissions rate of 130.8 grams per kilometer. Meanwhile, Europe’s five biggest markets averaged just 140.3 grams per kilometer. [SButtonZ button="digg"]
But wait, you say, what about miles per gallon? Surely we’ve improved our Hummer-esque track record with MPG? Not so — in fact, the MPG story is even worse: According to CNET, 33.9% of vehicles sold in the U.S. still fall within a 15 MPG to 20 MPG consumption bracket. Compare that to Europe, where only 0.28% of vehicle sales in Europe fall with that bracket, or Japan, where the number is a mere 0.63% of sales.
There are many possible explanations for our downright glacial move toward energy efficient vehicles in this country. Sure, we can blame our cultural preferences for SUVs and our fetishizing of gas guzzlers. But with numbers like this, it’s time for those in power — policymakers and car companies — to push us toward a major shift. Since relying on consumers to buy hybrids sure isn’t cutting it.
Absolutely. Frankly, the whole “Go Green!” marketing blitz has been wearing pretty thin. If it didn’t work while it was trendy, it certainly won’t after it’s been repeated a hundred times. It’s all about pricing and infrastructure, and those are the two arenas most Americans have not been willing to address. Present company excepted, of course.
Despite the impression you’d get from the article, diesel is not a solution to carbon emissions. Diesel is more energy-dense than gas, so it can get you further on a single gallon, but it also emits more. All else being equal, the carbon emissions per km are nearly identical. But there are other reasons to use diesel rather than gas – for example, it reduces overall oil consumption – which are why Europe is encouraging its use by lower fuel tax rates.
What you say about “What about miles per gallon?” is a little misleading, because the only way to reduce grams of CO2 per km is to increase fuel economy, and vice versa. The EPA provides conversion formulas for gas and diesel. For gas, N mpg = 5,461/N g/km. For diesel, N mpg = 6,266/N g/km. This is for CO2; measuring just carbon leads to numbers that are off by a factor of 3.63, and one of the links in the article makes that mistake.
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so that 33% of vehicles that fall in the 15-20mpg bracket, that’s not bad considering that 48-50% of all light vehicles sold in the US are trucks. Not sure that it’s fair to blame car companies for building and selling vehicles that American’s want, blame the idiots driving the Tahoes and Expeditions….and yes also the Toyota Forerunners and Nissan Armadas. I’ll bet if most americans wanted oil in their water, BP would be blowing up oil rigs left and right.
Robert makes a good point.
I drive both a pickup truck (not very often as it’s expensive) and a passenger car that gets 30+mpg. I will never NOT have a truck because I’m American and this country is REALLY BIG and I own land and equipment. There needs to be a differentiation between pointless S.U.V.s and actual trucks. I’d be very comfortable with regulations stating that vehicles with independent front suspensions be reclassified as passenger cars and not light trucks. Light trucks should be non commercial TRUCKS.
Also, never underestimate the sophistication of the american consumer. Unfortunately, you’re taking your life into your own hands when you don’t drive a 5000lb vehicle with 300 horsepower. Not from the swarms of other soccermoms but because there’s so much over the road trucking. Build a real rail system, get the big rigs off the road, and make the federal fleet regulations apply to what are basically glorified station wagons with lift kits.
@John: I’d be curious at what gasoline price point you’d change your mind about “never NOT” owning a truck. You may be among those who’d always own one, but I’m guessing expensive gasoline would factor into many decisions about ownership. It just seems so glaringly obvious that the single, most elegant way to increase fuel efficiency is to make fuel expensive.
Even where fuel is expensive, people who actually need trucks still own trucks. The key is to get to the people who are just buying trucks because they think trucks look cool, or all their friends have one, or for that one time a year they actually need it, or so on. And higher fuel prices can in fact get to such people.
Robert, the car companies aren’t just responding to demand. They’re creating it with false advertising, and lobbying the government and thinktanks to pass standards that make it easier to sell big cars and harder to fight GHG emissions. For example, the major car companies all fund Reason, which issues position papers saying that a) global warming isn’t happening, and b) the best way to fight global warming is to drive more.
John, the US actually has one of the highest rail freight modal shares in the world. Europe, whose freight rail system is disjointed and hampered by union rules making it difficult to run trains across national borders, has a much higher truck mode share, and much smaller cars than the US; its roads are no less safe than the US’s.
Alon: do you know how much fungibility there is between gasoline and diesel at a refinery? I have always wondered and never found a clear answer. The basic operation at a refinery is to consecutively distill off ever heavier boiling hydrocarbons out of the oil, until you are left with tar. First come off some light compounds that are often used for chemicals, then gasoline, then jet fuel, then diesel, etc. I am sure that refiners have the capacity to turn some process chemistry knobs in order to get a higher output of one fuel vs the other, based on market demands, but there is probably a limit to this. If I am correct, the basic way things work in today’s market is that Europe uses more diesel than gas (relatively to what refineries can make), and that Europe sends is excess gasoline to the US, because we use more gas than diesel.
If every American switched to diesel, I doubt it would be easy (or energy-free) to switch our refineries to producing diesel-only. That might offset any gains made by the higher efficiencies that can be had with hotter engines.
Bigger cars/Trucks/SUV’s release more emissions than 3 cylinder diesel hatchbacks – SHOCKER.
We’re going to see declines, but it’s not just going to be overnight. Americans/Canadians like their big cars. I think they should just say all petroleum cars off the road by 2025. Drastic, yes. But forcing innovation would be better in the long term.
Someone crack out the old designs of the Ford Nucleon.
SUVs are the only answer to taking your whole family out. Mom dad and 3-4 kids and 1-2 of their friends. Minivans don’t have enough HP for red blooded americans. With how americans drive, the bigger your on the road, the more “safe” you are. Americans think if you take your kids on public transit they will be kidnapped at gunpoint from you and cut up for organs.
The idea that people spend money on cars, and repairs, and maintenance, and fuel and insurance, etc. because of some propaganda campaign is some of the most daft wishful thinking I have ever seen on this site. Taking transit or biking has been supported my a multi-generational campaign of explicit public service announcements, moral suasion and elite media and university propagandizing for 50 years. You know, on sites like this one, for example. That’s propaganda. People use cars because they are useful. There’s no conspiracy, no trick. They are very, very useful. Get a grip.
Wrong, Eric F., as usual. There is collusion between vested interests in government and the automobile and highway industry to subsidize driving and auto ownership at the expense of public transit. The gas tax doesn’t begin to pay for the cost of highways. Laws are slanted towards sprawl and highway development, and the auto industry likes that just fine. General Motors helped destroy the streetcar networks in American cities.
Oh, and people use autos for transit in the U.S. generally because there are no other options. Once again, due to industry-influenced policy decisions of half a century of more ago.
@Eric F.: Cars are useful, but it still boggles my mind how the SUV — an unstable, top-heavy, rough-riding, gas-hogging, behemoth with less interior space than a mini-van, and designed for off-roading but often with only two-wheel drive — could become popular. Or was it just good marketing? Or cheap gasoline?
“people use autos for transit in the U.S. generally because there are no other options”. People rent parking spots for thousands of dollars a month in Greenwich Village and Park Slope. These are people who put Obama and Greenpeace stickers on their Range Rovers. Cars are very useful.
Brent, I kind of agree and kind of disagree about SUVs. Any gas using vehicle is going to be more or less desirable based on fuel prices, but I wouldn’t sell the SUV short. I don’t have one my self, but they are nice to drive, and I usually seek them out as rentals. Being a few feet above the road makes driving more fun, and the storage capabilities are highly useful. The height of your trunk also makes loading and unloading stuff easier. Finally, with all the insane safety equipment people have to have in their cars, most especially these huge car seats, I understand why people want them one the size of the family increases to more than 2 kids. Try sticking 3 kids + parents in an Accord, with the car seats kids must be in until they graduate grammar school (slight exaggeration). You’ll see why people buy those behemoth Navigators and Expeditions.
Aside from storage space, and maybe the whole being up high thing, I cannot see any practical use for the SUV. I honestly do believe their popularity is mostly due to marketing. Frankly, our abysmal record on fuel economy is a national embarrassment. We drive more than everyone else – can’t we at least have more efficient cars?
Regarding this ongoing debate about the popularity of the automobile, both sides have some points. You know what? Cars ARE useful, very much so. It’s true, and some segments of the environmental community do like to paper over this fact. However, the fact that cars are useful does not mean that we in the U.S. have not, by dint of a series of public policy choices, made the car not only useful, but necessary. I’m not sure it really amounts to collusion, though in some circumstances it might. But neglecting public transit investment in favor of highways, minimum parking requirements, zoning laws that encourage sprawl – all of these things happened, all of them had the effect of increasing driving, and none were necessary. We could have taken a different route and today we would not be so beholden to the automobile. But we didn’t.
To wit: I believe – don’t have time to check the stats right now – that auto ownership in NYC and most large European cities hovers around 50% of households, or a little less. There are two ways of looking at this:
1) Look how many people don’t own cars! People in big cities obviously do not like or want them!
2) Look how many people do own cars, despite the difficulties! Obviously, everyone really wants a car!
Both of these views are correct, and incorrect. Cars are useful, therefore, people with the means to own one generally do, even in dense urban centers. But in such places cars are not NECESSARY, so many others do not. The point, really, is that we should plan our cities for people. To a certain extent, the automobile is antithetical to the city simply because it takes up a lot more space than a person. So we should plan cities so that they are cities, and we should strive to ensure that people have options in terms of getting around. This means having good public transit, walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes where it’s practical, etc. It also means that many people will continue to have cars, because even in a place like New York, cars are often useful. And if they choose to do that, that’s fine.
Its not about the car, its about the options. We should not plan our cities for the car, but we should also remember that cars remain useful and cannot – should not – be willed away.
Chad: no, I don’t know how fungible gas and diesel are. I only have nth hand articles in the mainstream media (i.e. probably wrong) about how some people switched to diesel in response to high oil prices.
I like the comment that you need to drive a 5000 lb truck to be safe on America’s roads. This is somewhat belied by the reality: in the UK, there are about 6 road fatalities per 100,000 people every year, while in the USA it’s 16.
Nor does the suggestion that you need your trucks hold much water. In Europe, most small businesses get by with a light van running at about 30mpg average fuel consumption (maybe down to 25mpg for the larger vehicles). Trucks can be fuel efficient too!
Or look at what commenters suggest is the main reason for popularity of SUVs – the inability of smaller vehicles to carry large families. In Europe, the popular vehicle for large families is something like the Renault Espace, which achieves an average fuel consumption around 37 mpg, or perhaps a Ford Galaxy, which manages 29 mpg.
The http://www.kshitij.com/research/petrol.shtml suggests European fuel prices are as much as five times higher than in the USA, so the reality is there’s nowhere in the USA where your gas is actually expensive – it’s all relatively cheap. High fuel prices don’t make us drive less, our roads are still congested, but they do make fuel consumption an important differentiator when purchasing a vehicle, and manufacturers respond accordingly.
In similar vein, the UK operates an annual vehicle tax which differentiates according to carbon emissions. The US’s average emission rate of 255 g/km is equivalent to the HIGHEST band of tax in the UK (there are 13 bands), being taxed at more than 20 times tax for the second lowest band (the very lowest band pays no vehicle tax at all).
Clearly, these sorts of policy levers would be unpopular with most Americans. But don’t doubt that they can be effective where the political will exists.
[...] US is the largest SUV market in the world, and it’s no surprise that US autos emit an average of 255 g/km CO2, compared to 130.8 g/km for Japan and 140 g/km for Europe. Bringing these numbers down [...]