Let’s Talk About Automobile Pollution.
In the past nobody cared. Cars were smelly noisy things that people put up with. The fuel they burned was also dangerous to the environment as well. So the original cars have noise pollution, bad odors and polluted the environment. Boy! They have come a long way since those days. Most ICE cars don’t make much noise any more. There are plastic baffles and covers to lower the noise form the engine. Exhausts have mufflers to quieten the noise from this location. What about smelly? Well yes they are still smelly. Just look at any large city in the world. You will see the smog and if you go there in the street you will smell the fumes from all the ICE engines.
It is no wonder the city authorities are legislating to ban them from their cities and putting stringent pollution controls into place. These days service centers have exhaust sniffers to measure the pollution at every service. This brings me to the story about my 1982 Volvo 240 DL. It was a leaded petrol car. When leaded petrol became obsolete I had no recourse but to use unleaded petrol in it. This meant installing a catalytic converter to burn unleaded. (required by law). So this car had all the original pollution control gear on it as well as a catalytic converter on it. To compensate for lower octane rating I used premium petrol. In every tank I used to put Wynn’s gas treatment. This compensated for the lack of led in the petrol.
When it came to servicing this vehicle the technicians would be amazed at the reading taken from the exhaust. It was fun to watch them. They would put the sniffer in the exhaust and get no reading. Assuming that the sniffer was broken it was tested on several other vehicles. Then put back on the Volvo. Same result was observed. I don’t know what the figures for the pollution might have been but they would have been interesting.
Going to my present vehicle. A 2007 Subaru Forester. Its tailpipe has remained perfectly clean for 11 years. It still has the original exhaust system fitted. What ever is coming from the exhaust of this vehicle is a colorless gas. CO2 is a colorless odorless gas which causes greenhouse effects to the planet. So is CO. There are obviously no particulates generated by this vehicle. I certainly would not want to sniff the exhaust fumes though. They would be toxic.
I thought this was an interesting look at the state of affairs relating to today’s ICE cars. We all know about diesel gate. You only have to sit behind one at the traffic lights and watch the pollution coming from it when the vehicle takes off.
Let me digress for a bit. It is appropriate to talk about other sources for carbon emission. In Australia people are talking about clean coal. Perhaps it is wrong to call it clean coal. Fabric filter bags are installed on all the coal fired power stations to remove the particulates from the smoke before it entered the stacks. This is a requirement by law. The harmful gasses still are emitted from the stacks you just can’t see them. Another source of carbon emissions is shipping. Bunker oil burns black as your boot. Now days there are scrubbers in the funnels to clean the smoke before it is released into the air. Trouble is sea water is used for this and it is put back into the sea scrubbings and all.
So you can see we need to lift our game if we don’t want to suffer climate change. Make no bones about it though. Climate change is happening as you read this. Earth is a living thing. It tries to compensate for anomalies but we are asking too much of it if we think we can continue on our present course of polluting. In the past whole civilizations have perished from this very cause. If you have eyes to see the stories are written in Earth’s memory. The geologists find the evidence in the strata layers that they study. All this happened before and it will happen again. It is true, however that many main stream scientists sough at this notion because it goes against their preconceived notions of what they think the world is like.
While researching this article I came across something of interest regarding clean coal fired power stations. In my city of Gladstone, Queensland, Australia, there is such a power station. Its output is 1600 mega watts. Its stacks have been clean for over 20 years. When you are shown coal fired power houses on the news in some place like China, the stacks are all shown with much black smoke coming from them. I wonder whether this is the true case or not. Since the technology exists it follows that no power station on the planet should be putting out great plumbs of pollution. These technologies can be retro fitted to any coal fired power station. As a matter of interest the following link below makes for interesting reading about state of the art of the clean coal technology. It appears that Gladstone Power Station is one of the cleanest coal fired power stations in the world. Link:https://www.nrggos.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/29033_AIr_Emissions_Brochure_-_April_2008.pdf
