Car Emissions in Seattle
Have you ever thought about what Seattle would be like if there are no cars on the street? The cars make our lives become convenient and there are so many other advantages that we cannot live without cars. However, the large number of cars in Seattle are gradually destroying our environment since the emissions of cars contribute a lot to the Greenhouse gases which cause the climate change. The car emission problem in Seattle becomes so intense that must be fixed as soon as possible because it affects the global climate, influences the citizens' health conditions and ………
The reason that why there are so many car emissions in Seattle is that there are too many cars on the street. According to Gene Balk, he said that
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Another way to look at it: For every 1,000 city residents, there are 637 cars here. Among the 10 most densely populated big cities, Seattle easily has the most cars per capita — even more than Los Angeles (Balk, 2017). " With that extremely high number of cars, it is easier to understand why the road transportation occupy the largest part of Greenhouse gas emissions. As it shown in the figure, passenger and freight contribute around 65% of the total Greenhouse Gas emissions. So, the car emissions are the major factors that would influence both climate and people a lot. This is the reason why we care about the impact of car emissions in Seattle and why we need to address some solutions to deal with it.
One of the biggest impact of car emissions is causing global warming rapidly and it will have a negative influence in Seattle. The gases of cars emit are usually nitrous oxide and methane, but the major part of the exhaust is carbon dioxide. In the figure below, it shows the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2015 by sector. From the data, we can clearly see that the carbon dioxide occupies around 80% of the total Greenhouse Gas. Since the climate change mainly causes by Greenhouse Gas, if we emit
With a declining or no use of cars can result in the reduction of pollution quite tremendously. They can by reducing the greenhouse effect. As the author reports in the article, “In German Suburb Life Goes On Without Care” by Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe… and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.” Therefore, with cars being a leading factor of greenhouse gas emissions, reducing their usage would have a positive effect on the environment. After days of near-record pollution,
The U.S government has been actively involved in overseeing emission standards for years. This corresponds with the statement made by the U.S Department of transportation that, “Transportation is the largest end-use sector emitting CO2”, and also the statement released by the NRCAN in which, “Fuel usage & carbon dioxide emissions have grown steadily over the past two decades.” These factors are only to be associated with your average four door sedan and/or light truck. These do not include your 18 wheelers, heavy trucks, or the gas guzzling vans that emit more carbon dioxide into the air and are also on the road more today than ever have been before. Cars are readily and easily obtainable more so now than ever have been. This creates more fuel to be burned up in which produces more toxins to be constantly released into the atmosphere. In fact, according to Scientific American “cars relate as much as 30 gallons of GHG, while only driving 3 miles.” These miles can be correlated with something just as simple as your average work commute. According to the United States Census Bureau, “Nearly 600,000 full-time workers had "megacommutes" of at least 90 minutes and 50 miles.” Those workers alone would each be releasing up to 500 gallons of GHG. These can be considered some of the bigger factors that the greenhouse gasses have taken a toll on.
Pollution has become a heated issue in recent years. The destruction of the environment along with serious health problems are the eventual effects. The extensive use and availability of automobiles, tremendous amounts of production in the booming economy and the constant increase in demand for energy, can be held responsible.
It has little to no effect to the environment when one car is on the road, but what if there are three billion other cars on the road? With the amount of carbon dioxide discharged into the air, diseases are forming, natural resources are diminishing, ice caps are melting. Who is held responsible for this? Who is responsible for the carbon dioxide debt that we owe the planet? Essentially, the government is held responsible for this clutter. Because of the lack of regulation and promotion from the government, citizens are mindlessly wasting water, littering trash, and overexploiting nature for its valuable resources. Therefore, the government must be held responsible for fostering green practices.
The second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States is related to transportation, the burning of oil to produce energy in a combustion motor. The combustion process inside of engines is what produces the carbon matter that is emitted into the air through the exhaust system on gas-powered vehicles. Gas-powered transportation is accountable for 24 percent of the global carbon emissions; this should not come as much of a surprise given the amount of urban sprawl that is being seen in the United States and across the globe. In the past decade, the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States government, and major car manufacturers have been working in conjunction to find ways to provide a “greener” form of transportation (EPA, 2011). This has included testing the use of hydropower, ethanol, natural gas, biodiesel, and electricity as a means of powering vehicles, which has led to the introduction of hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicles run on electricity and gasoline, the byproduct of oil that is generally used in the engine combustion process of vehicles (U.S. Department of
First, cars pollute the environment. In 2012 the EPA reported that a whopping 28% of emissions came from transportation. As it says in the article “Running off the Road”, by Grover Kingsley, “With their largely petroleum based fuel, cars constantly spew carbon monoxide into the air.” We are responsible for the
Climate change and transportation play a big role and it is important to be concerned for our future generations. The use of gasoline cars is a major producer in carbon dioxide emissions, although they are not entirely responsible for it—they play a role in it. Other form of transportations like buses and taxis also contribute to carbon dioxide emissions. The total amount of carbon dioxide emissions from an average car is seventy six percent which comes from usage of a vehicle containing gasoline. Efficiency has increased by twenty percent in regards to electric motors, especially when it comes to their wheels using no power when the car is at rest. Car ownership will increase and with this, improvements in technology could be a vital
If the public transportation improves, more and more people would take buses instead of driving. Then there would be less CO2 for our environment. Mohammad-Beigi, Nouri and Liaghati (2015) claim that the population in large cities is growing very fast, which means that transportation needs also increase really fast which leads to environmental problems. Therefore, in order to solve the problem, improving public transportation is a good solution. This study shows that driving cars really causes air pollution and it is harm for our environment. Phoenix is the largest city in Arizona, so the population growth in Phoenix will lead to the same problem that the three author mentioned. Improving public transportation will be helpful in decreasing the number of drivers and therefore reducing toxic emission. According to the PR Newswire Europe Improving public transportation in Brasilia (2009) claim public transportation is good because buses are more orderly, and they are safer and have less impact on the environment. It also shows that public transportation can help to reduce air pollution. Phoenix is an urban city like Brasilia, so it has a similar situation. Improving public transportation would be a good solution because it will lead to less driving. Then we will reduce exhaust gas
“Green” is hardly a term used for parking lots of the last twenty years or so, though perhaps is has become more increasingly popular over the past few years when faced with the idea of the global impact. The idea of carbon dioxide playing such a huge factor in the climate changes of the last century or so is not a new conclusion, in fact most scientist many eons ago concluded that carbon dioxide is one of the single biggest causes of climate change. To think that massive asphalt and concrete causes urban heat islands cause the increase of global proportions, and if so, there must be some things as contributors, we could do to stop the influx of human-caused land changes on climate.
photochemical reaction which means car-exhaust emissions like nitrogen oxides combine with sunlight to create a pollutant. In a city of millions-like Los Angeles where nearly every person drives a car, smog forms quickly. In addition to the many car-emissions, smog also forms in Los Angeles as a result of the many industrial factories. Although Los Angeles now contains few of the (once ubiquitous) industrial plants, the pollution still moves in from neighboring cities. On a daily basis, thousands of grams of nitrogen dioxide enter the atmosphere. Los Angeles’ geography also makes it also a perfect smog trap as the mountains combined with the temperature inversions trap pollutants in an overheated bowl (Los Angeles: Traffic And Smog”).
Transportation is the number one thing we consumers do that harms the environment. Transportation causes the highest amount of environmental damage overall - nearly half of the toxic air pollution and more than a quarter of the greenhouse gases traceable to household consumption. Over time, however, sales of trucks, vans and SUV's went from 16% market share to over 50%. One big auto manufacturer even shelved their work of the last three years, spent updating their most popular selling economy car, so they could spend the money getting SUVs to market faster.
In addition, these six counties had at least one or more code red days per year, when air pollution has reached unhealthy and harmful levels for everyone. These six counties, Rockdale, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, Cobb, and Rockdale, all lie the nearest to the city of Atlanta, an intersection of interstate highways. Though many culprits contribute to this hazardous level of air pollution in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, cars contribute so much more because of the sheer amount of cars that exist in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area. An average car can emit 6 tons of carbon dioxide per year, and assuming that the every adult has a car that does not run on electricity in Metro Atlanta’s population of 5,490,000, there would be 32,940,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by those cars per year. To give a perspective, the Scherer plant, a coal-fired power plant, in Juliet, Georgia gives off 25.3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, but these estimations do not include other vehicles that emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants (Center for Global
Two main causes are burning fossil fuels and driving our cars. According to a NASA earth observatory web page, “fossil fuel burning (coal, oil and gas) releases about 6 billion metric tons per year.” On the EPA web site, it is stated that most of the emissions of greenhouse gases, “about 82%, are from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and power our cars.” As I said before, driving our cars also is a large cause. For example, Ecobridge states that “Twenty percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions comes from the burning of gasoline in internal-combustion engines of cars and light trucks.” So a fair amount of the emissions is from driving your car.
Automobiles are a major producer of greenhouse gas. One gallon of fuel burned puts five pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Let’s say that an average car gets 25 miles to the gallon, and that car has a ten gallon tank. Every time a car gets filled up with gas, another fifty pounds of carbon dioxide have been put back into the atmosphere, and that is just one car. The automobile industry is very important to the world economy, so I am not saying that we should stop making cars, but there are other solutions. The recent trend of hybrid electric cars that get up to fifty miles to the gallon are becoming more popular. Also public transportation is very important. City dwellers that live downtown, do not need to drive their cars to work. Every major city has a form of public transportation that can get anyone around the city, and for that gallon of gas a bus burns the same five pounds reaches the atmosphere, but instead of one
Kenya, like many other developing countries in Africa, is experiencing a rapid growth of urbanization. Many cities and towns have grown in population size and have also expanded spatially to form huge metropolitan regions. The rapid urbanization also generates a lot of economic and environmental problems and challenges. Nairobi is one such metropolitan region that follows this trend in Kenya. With the demand for cars in Kenya rising every day, so is the level of air pollution. Vehicles contribute to this evil at a very high level. But there are ways of helping reduce the amount of pollution caused by car emissions. The gases expelled from petrol engine cars contain carbon