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Originally Posted by UFO
You are confusing me with someone else. My daily driving is exclusively biodiesel and blends. I am committed to renewable fuel to reduce pollution and promote energy independence. And IMHO the way forward is not through the corn and soy agribusiness.
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Agreed 1000% These businesses are very inefficient and highly energy and chemical dependant. Fuels from materials that
1. Need no fertalizer
2. Require minimal if any tilling,cultivating (AKA use diesel fuel to produce)
would be optimal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by UFO
But carburetors and polluting vehicles need to be retired. Of course there should be exceptions for collector and specialty vehicles, but if it's easy and cheap to register them, pollution levels will increase unnecessarily. The used market is full of low cost and efficient vehicles, and they are cheaper to operate.
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On this I disagree, there are MANY exceptional vehicles from years past that can achieve fuel economy levels that are very challenging to meet with most modern car offerings which all hover in the 30mpg area.
The true path to reducing real pollution is to
1. First and most importantly reduce the pollution from production and transport of the fuel, the pollution from making a gallon of gas and getting it to you far exceeds the pollution of burning of that gallon of gas.
2. Second the next best way to reduce pollution is to reduce the amount of pollution created by making the car, quite easily using the car longer does this. Making the car many times makes more pollution than the gas it will burn.
3. Third the best way of reducing REAL pollution from just the vehicles emissions itself is to reduce the amount of fuel consumed, even if the vehicle has more volitiles in the exhaust the impact from reducing the amount of fuel used is far more effective than burning more fuel to have a lower percent of volitiles, nox & sulphur all of which degrade in the environment and are harmless in rural areas. Only cities and population centers really need NOX limited. To me reducing CO2 is primary, exotics usually break down whereas CO2 will not.
4. The last thing you need to do to reduce overall volume of pollution is to have improved pollution controls, a properly designed & tuned engine and a basic cat do the job as best as is reasonable. Some exceptional engines actually do better with no cat in place and are optimal. Beyond that are rather steep diminishing returns and potentially technolgies that create pollution above and beyond the exhaust just because of themselves. Urea for example is adding a transport, packaging and manufacturing set of pollution that is likely NOT recovered during its operation on MOST vehicles excluding the very largest. You will find the same to be true of most overly exotic pollution controls in that they really are increasing pollution in the form of increased manufacturing, transport & packaging levels, least of which is increased costs & maintenance.
Cheers
Ryan May