快猫短视频

IF YOU were thinking of scrapping your old car for a newer model to help the
environment, think again.

Bert van Wee of the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment
at Utrecht University in the Netherlands has found that getting rid of your old
banger and buying a new car produces more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide
than just sticking with the old car. 鈥淚n terms of CO₂, it is without a
doubt better to do nothing,鈥� he says.

Many countries have introduced policies or tax incentives that encourage the
scrapping of old gas guzzlers so that they can be replaced by more efficient
modern cars. Some environmentalists claim that this will reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases.

But van Wee suspected this wouldn鈥檛 be the case. People hadn鈥檛 taken into
account the fact that new cars are heavier and more powerful than older ones.
The current Volkswagen Golf weighs about 1100 kilograms, for example, whereas
the first Golf weighed about 800 kilograms.

Van Wee also knew that no one had factored into the equation the energy used
in scrapping and the emissions released in car manufacture. So to find the true
cost to the environment, he and his colleagues adjusted the statistics on car
emissions collected by the Dutch government. They introduced figures for
emissions resulting from scrapping, or even recycling, the old cars and from
producing new cars.

They found that reducing the average age of cars in the Netherlands by three
years would increase CO₂ emissions by 4 per cent overall. The problem
will persist until new cars are much more efficient, says van Wee.

He believes their study is, in fact, overly optimistic because people tend to
drive their comfortable new cars more than their old ones. Choosing a modern car
may reduce other harmful emissions such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic
compounds, van Wee concedes. But these could be mopped up by fitting existing
cars with catalytic converters, he adds.

Seth Dunn, an energy transport researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, the
environmental watchdog based in Washington, DC, says that he isn鈥檛 surprised by
the findings. 鈥淲e need to think about the efficiency of the entire life cycle of
cars,鈥� he agrees.

But Dunn cautions that we shouldn鈥檛 necessarily hang onto our old cars. He
wants car manufacturers to make more effort to improve car efficiencies and
consumers to be more energy conscious in their choices. Another problem lies in
the way the statistics are gathered. In the US, for example, more than half of
new vehicles produced are classed as sports utility vehicles. These are gas
guzzlers that are excluded from statistics on other cars due to their different
classification.