Trebuchet. . . you have to work 125% harder to clean things up at the refinery. thats the 5:4 issue. It's possible to make refineries cleaner. . .but the people who run them have no interest in doing that because it goes from cutting into their profits to draconian cuts into profits.
If you make it impossible to do business people quit doing business. Even if legislation is passed to force refineries to release no emissions, they will simply consume enormous amounts of power to filter it all out. And all of a sudden the power plant begins releasing more emissions than the refinery was, because of the increased demand. We limit the coal plants. . . and instead of losing money per ton of coal per however many KWH they shut down, fire thousands and walk out while they still have capital.
And no it's not like your optician saying because your eyes are messed up you shouldn't read. The doesn't correct the issue. Emissions controls would be like mandating that all text has to be large enough for you to read it, instead of just giving you eyeglasses.
EPA likes to correct things and do the blanket effect. Your doctor designs eyeglasses just for you to get your sight back on track.
The fastest way to change global emissions is do something everyone else will do with no coercion. Emissions policies are followed by a few handfuls of countries and there is no way to make the others come to the table. If you increase all Gas driven vehicles around the world by 10% MPG you reduce global emissions 10%.
Sure, its entirely possible to limit the products of the combustion equation, but the cost is higher than the gain. we gain not dropping a few tenths of a gram of hydrocarbons at the cost of half a gram of Sulfer Dioxides, and a third of a gram of NOx emissions, plus several more pounds of CO2 per car per per week.
It would be a fantastic world if we could just say "we are not going to emit pollutants anymore." We could.
It would cost a nuclear power plant on the 500 MW scale, per day for 10 years to get there. Because if you are really going to emit 0 emissions you are going to have to run off an unfathomably large electrical grid.
Can't use batteries because they release emissions on their terminals, Fuel Cells are out because they introduce rust in to the ground water supply(what comes out of Hydrogen fuel cell pipes mixes with the pipes gradually rusting them) and your only options are to transmit electricity in some form of wave through roadside rails to cars that store it in uninvented ultra-capacitors and power their electric motors. At that point though you step out of the solid pollutant range and into the energy pollution. broadcasting that kind of power in microwave form or any other form is probably likely to have detrimental side effects.
Yes I agree with you. It would be fantastic if we could limit car emissions to 0, refinery emissions to 0 and power plants to 0. Unless you have an idea on how to make several quadrillion in USD and intend to hand it over to the US government to rebuild our electrical infrastructure, it won't happen in the next 20 years.
So the answer is we should stop whining about emissions being produced that we CAN'T change and do something about FE that we can radically change.
Aptera
It gets something like 240 odd MPG after its batteries have gone dry. There are cars on this forum that get 100 MPG. If you change nothing else on your car and you cut your fuel consumption in 1/3(EPA 35 mpg is roughly 1/3 of 100) you reduce your emissions by 1/3.
If you don't think so only drive 1/3 of the way to work, get out and walk the rest of the way. walk back to your car and drive home. you emit 1/3 as much.
Since that doesn't sound fun(instead of walking that extra 5 miles per gallon of gas I use) I just popped off my cat and eseentially produce the same number of emissions.