![PM25-LONDON[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/pm25-london1.jpg?quality=83)
London’s Dirty Secret: Pollution Worse Than Beijing’s
Reader Drew H. submits this story.
It’s the law of unintended consequences at work. European Union efforts to fight climate change favored diesel fuel over gasoline because it emits less carbon dioxide, or CO2. However, diesel’s contaminants have swamped benefits from measures that include a toll drivers pay to enter central London, a thriving bike-hire program and growing public-transport network.
Successive governments knew more than 10 years ago that diesel was producing all these harmful pollutants, but they myopically plowed on with their CO2 agenda,” said Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air in London, a nonprofit group. “It’s been a catastrophe for air pollution, and that’s not too strong a word. It’s a public-health catastrophe.
Europe-wide policy triggered the problem. The “dieselisation” of London’s cars began with an agreement between car manufacturers and the EU in 1998 that aimed to lower the average CO2 emissions of new vehicles. Because of diesel’s greater fuel economy, it increased in favor.
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Skoda sell a medium size family car in the UK which gets good fuel economy, the Skoda Octavia GreenLine III Hatch £20,300, which is 1.6 litre 110 BHP diesel. They have onboard energy recovery systems to get these figures, the main one being that the battery is charged when you brake.
Fuel consumption – Urban………..94 (UK)…..78 (US)
Fuel consumption – Extra urban…88 (UK)…..73 (US)
Fuel consumption – Combined…..74 (UK)…..62 (US)
See the link below for the explanation of the above European definitions of urban, extra urban, combined fuel consumption.
http://www.skoda.co.uk/fuel-consumption-statement
Whilst these are meant to be real world figures that reflect different driving styles and road mixes, I am always frustrted that you cannot get a motorway cruising fuel consumption figure from them.
Manufacturer blurb (Mazda) say that the next generration of engines in test will likely get a further 15 to 20% improvement in fuel econonmy which will mean that using UK gallons we will see 100 mpg cars on the road in about 4 years.
Thanks for the info, J Martin. I’m a great fan of the Octavia although we don’t get that particular model in Australia (and I suspect it would have manual transmission, which would be of no interest to me anyway). The main engine in the 2014 Octavia in Oz is the 1.4 litre turbo petrol, the diesel is the 2.0 litre and rather more expensive than the “base” engine. As for “published” fuel economy figures, while your UK ones are undoubtedly different to Oz ones, in my experience they bear little resemblance to reality. With my present European car I can get nowhere near any of the published figures, and the onboard computer readout is consistently about 0.5 l/100km optimistic. Quoted highway figure of 8l/100km I’ve never seen, and could only be achieved at a steady 70-80km/hr perhaps. My local highways are 110km/hr zones! Hence I average 10.5 to 11l/100km.
Fires? 3 or so, from serious accidents, all well-controlled and delayed (several minutes) by the battery housing. Try that with petrol (gas). Zero spontaneous fires Zero serious injuries or deaths in Tesla accidents to date. Safest car on the road, by far. Puts Volvo to shame, e.g. Cheapest to run. Best overall, ever, per Consumer Reports.
@ur momisugly Mike T. I am told I am getting a Skoda Octavia for my next company car. The company say they have ordered it, if they have then it will be another 12 weeks before I get it. Too late for my summer holidays when I could have given it a 2000 mile test on the French motorway network. Should average 3.2 litres per 100 km. Most of my mileage is on the motorway and as long as I stay under 70mph I will may get that, I have done with previous cars.
But I will be dropping back from 6 gears (a Mazda 6) to 5 gears and so I wonder if the more powerful version a 2.0 litre 150BHP car with 6 gears might in fact be the better buy, particularly for motorway driving, and may give me just as good fuel consumption as the less powerful car.
Perhaps to get the published mpg I will need to stick to lorry speed 56 mph (90 kph). I will try it for a week or so to see what mpg I can get. I would like to get that elusive 100mpg for one week, perhaps it can’t be done with current engines, but the next generation should make it doable. You certainly need it over here in the UK with some of the most expensive fuel in the world.
J. Martin, good luck with your new Octavia. I’ll be sticking with my European SUV for a while, despite its atrocious fuel economy. I do understand the need for economy in the UK, I was there many years ago and noted prices for fuel there and elsewhere in Europe. We in Oz have relatively cheap fuel, balanced by big distances to travel- our major cities are huge (I think the Sydney basin is close to the size of Holland!) with an unbelievable urban sprawl. I live in the outback, the nearest big town to the one I live in is 500km. Fuel is somewhat dearer in the bush, too, 20-25 cents per litre. Another factor for Australians is the need to carry stuff. When I leave this town I’ll have a car full, a roofbox, and towing a box trailer. I may encounter roadworks enroute where 4WD would be advantageous. So our uses and requirements differ across countries. It’s worth noting too that my town gets hordes of visitors through winter (sub-tropics) and one class of visitor is the “backpacker”: they come here mainly from Europe on a working visa. Their preferred vehicle is a delivery van, if they can’t get one of those cheaply enough they go for a Ford Falcon Wagon, sadly no longer made, replaced by an SUV, which by European standards is an enormous estate which takes a huge payload, and once unloaded can sleep two or three. Four litre engine, and not bad economy by Australian standards.
You know what would kill people fast, is putting everything on trains and expecting it all to reach the stores. If you bought it, a truck brought it.
The average mileage of a diesel truck in the US is 7mpg. A truck can legally haul approximately 40,000 pounds of freight across the country, from point of manufacture to point of sale if need be. There are approximately 3 million big-trucks in the US. How to calculate the amount of product shipped by diesel trucks in one day in the US is not as difficult as it looks at rough glance. The answer to the equation is “everthing.”
Therefore, the importance of diesel transport has to be factored in. How does “everything” – from medical to building supplies to food to conveniences – reach you? How does an area affected by disaster recover quickly? Goods reach any point in the contiguous 48 states efficiently and quickly through our fossil fuel powered infrastructure. Our 3 million 18 wheelers have shipped virtually every product you, the reader, have ever used. And now nearly everyone here appears to be somehow tempted to trade all of that for an EPA certificate of non-death from Particulate Matter.
Next up: 5 magic organic beans in exchange for all the cattle on a thousand hills.
New improved calm cool and corrected version. Thank you and apologies for typos etc.
“oldfox33 says:
May 31, 2014 at 12:20 am
Isn’t the WORSE “greenhouse gas” methane?
And isn’t the largest emitter of methane bovine flatulence?”
No, and no. Termites, forrests, bogs are by far the biggest emitter of CH4. But at ~1.8ppm/v and dropping, I’m not too worried about that.
Thanks, Patrick. I am still looking for a breakdown on bovine flatulence, but:
“The overall measure of a gas’s ability to contribute to global warming is called the Global Warming Potential (GWP) which measures the combination of the gas’s ability to trap solar radiation as heat and the length of time it persists in the atmosphere. The GWP of a gas is calculated relative to carbon dioxide’s GWP. As the right hand column of the table shows, most other greenhouse gases have far greater GWPs than carbon dioxide…. [CO2 GWP= 1; CH4 GPW= 23.]” IMO, that is “worse”
http://www.thehcf.org/emaila3.html
You’re worried about CO2, but not CH4? Or did I misunderstand you. I worry about EMPs and none of the greenhouse gases.