Feb 08 2007
How green is my bus?
The government has just come up with some interesting answers to my questions on CO2 emissions from different types of vehicle.
All their numbers are in metric units of course. They tell me that the average passenger on the average bus puts out 95 grams of CO2 for every kilometre travelled. This compares with 112 grams of CO2 for every kilometre travelled by a passenger on a long haul flight.
Listening to the debate in recent months you get the feeling that air travel is the main cause of our ruin, and that more bus travel would?? be our salvation. As these figures show, life is not as simple as that. The figures show that if two or more people are going to go somewhere together by road it is better they go by modern car than?? by bus if reducing carbon dioxide output is the main aim. They also show that?? bus travel is only 14% less damaging in terms of CO2 output than long distance air travel for each kilometre travelled, although people do of course by definition travel a lot of kilometres in one go on a plane. However, people on average??use buses much more frequently than planes, so the CO2 soon accumulates from frequent bus travel.
??Instead of people shouting at each other about different types of travel, trying to brand some as green and some as dangerous, we need a little balance and some facts. The true position is that??most motorised travel pushes out carbon dioxide. Buses and trains pollute as well as cars and planes.
Buses come out of the CO2 scoring badly in the UK because the average bus only has nine people on it. The average bus is quite old, so nine people are propelled forward by an old fashioned?? engine which is pushing out a lot of CO2.
We can make all types of travel greener by changing technology. We can also reduce carbon outputs per mile travelled by substituting more modern cars,buses or planes for older ones, and by more people using the vehicle when it is travelling.
If we want to make the bus green we need more new buses and more people on them. That means choosing more popular routes, running frequent services in heavily populated areas, and wooing people to the bus. If we carry on doing what we are doing now, the bus is far from green.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Of course this also ignores one very important fact with public transport - it doesn’t go on the optimum route for all passengers. If I want to go to the out of town supermarket, by car this is a 5 minute drive, it’s a 20 minute bus journey going through several estates. So by that measure a bus would be outputting 380 grams of CO2 for each kilometre I really need to travel.
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You also need to factor into the calculation, how much CO2 does it take to produce the new buses, cars and planes.
I have a feeling that for cars and buses where the entire vehicle has to be scrapped, the carbon maths would not stack up.
Because plane engines can be changed without scrapping the rest of the aircraft, it could make sense there.
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How does the carbon emitted per passenger by a full coach between, say, London and Warsaw compare with a full plane between the same two cities?
A problem in London is that while there are now many more buses on the streets than before, the system has been widened but the popular routes are still overcrowded. Lots more empty buses on un-used routes and not enough on the useful ones!
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This whole argument, how much CO2 does ‘x’ produce doing ‘y’ amount of work, is completely sterile and totally irrevelant. No it is actually damaging, not least to our industry.
CO2 is one of the least significant greenhouse gasses well behind, would you believe water vapour. We are running around hamstringing our industry with CO2 quotas and pointless regulations for nothing, no gain, zero benefit.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M
And this is why the Tories under Cameron are such a waste of time. Instead of standing up for the truth and fighting the greenoid facists, for that is what they are, he has joined them. No it is worse he cycles to Parliament with his mercedes running behind, crawling through the traffic at 6 miles per hour. Cameron like the Greenoids is a fraud he certanly isn’t a Tory.
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