[hajile]

The 15 largest shipping container ships produce as much sulfur pollution as all non-commercial cars on the entire planet put together. There's thousands of those ships. Of all vehicle pollution, something like 95+% of it is large commercial vehicles.

Your switching from a truck to a car makes effectively ZERO difference in global emissions. If EVERY non-commercial vehicle in the US went down to ZERO pollution, it wouldn't even be noticed in the statistical noise of the country's pollution.

[antod]

My first web search seems to disagree on those numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon...

But if everyone just cherry picks a worse example than themselves to justify not doing anything until they are the worst, then no progress will ever happen.

[hajile]

You are making the mistake of thinking that CO2 is the biggest or worst polluter and that only greenhouse pollution matters. Look up sulfur pollution. It is basically non-existent in gasoline, but rampant in other fossil fuels and is far more impactful.

[MrJohz]

FWIW, often statistics talking about CO2 are actually talking about CO2 equivalent, which is a way of normalising the harm levels of different pollutants. Typically this is used to compare things like farming and fossil fuels, which produce very different gases.

Unfortunately, I can't tell if the source linked actually uses this metric but isn't being clear, or if it's just focused on CO2, and I'm struggling to find another source that does use CO2 equivalent emissions as a metric.

[antod]

No, CO2 was just the context of the discussion.

[hajile]

I specified I was talking explicitly about sulfur pollution.

[KingOfCoders]

One mouse drops more mice hair in nature than all humans (~8B!) combined!

[hairofadog]

One mouse do what now?

[quickthrower2]

But they only tested on mice so we can’t be sure

[poopbutt7]

Sulfur dioxide has a cooling effect. So keep doing that, I guess.