Cyprus-Forum.com

[devil]

First draft of my initial impressions here! Will be finalised within a week or so.

[skyvet]

Found that very interesting Devil. It seems an awful lot of technology for a road vehicle, and I would wonder about the costs involved should a serious problem occur. That having been said, my impression was favourable.

[cyprusgrump]

I'm certainly not ready to change it and knowing it is helping me to do a tiny little bit towards reducing the effects of climate change is also satisfying

Surely, if you’d kept your old car and the Civic had not been manufactured you would have been making a considerably greater contribution?

[devil]

I'm certainly not ready to change it and knowing it is helping me to do a tiny little bit towards reducing the effects of climate change is also satisfying

Surely, if you’d kept your old car and the Civic had not been manufactured you would have been making a considerably greater contribution?

That is a red herring. Look at it holistically. If every car, at the end-of-life, were replaced by a hybrid, then fuel consumption over the whole country would be, say, halved. If the average lifetime of a car is, say, 12 years (from the write-off of a nearly new car to a 20-year old banger that cannot pass the MoT), that means that it would take 12 years to reach a reasonably utopian but significant reduction of fuel imports and CO2 emissions. The new car has to be made, whether it is hybrid or not. The old car is 72% recycled into new ones (EU Directives) so new cars require relatively little in the way of virgin materials. The battery and electric motor of a hybrid are 100% recyclable and fetch very high prices in the market (nickel, magnetic alloys and copper).

So, which is better for the environment, replacing an EOL vehicle by a gas guzzler or by a hybrid? Hopefully, my CR-V, for the rest of its life, will have been bought by someone who was using a smoky old diesel SUV that was no longer roadworthy.

[cyprusgrump]

I'm certainly not ready to change it and knowing it is helping me to do a tiny little bit towards reducing the effects of climate change is also satisfying

Surely, if you’d kept your old car and the Civic had not been manufactured you would have been making a considerably greater contribution?

That is a red herring. Look at it holistically. If every car, at the end-of-life, were replaced by a hybrid, then fuel consumption over the whole country would be, say, halved. If the average lifetime of a car is, say, 12 years (from the write-off of a nearly new car to a 20-year old banger that cannot pass the MoT), that means that it would take 12 years to reach a reasonably utopian but significant reduction of fuel imports and CO2 emissions. The new car has to be made, whether it is hybrid or not. The old car is 72% recycled into new ones (EU Directives) so new cars require relatively little in the way of virgin materials. The battery and electric motor of a hybrid are 100% recyclable and fetch very high prices in the market (nickel, magnetic alloys and copper).

So, which is better for the environment, replacing an EOL vehicle by a gas guzzler or by a hybrid? Hopefully, my CR-V, for the rest of its life, will have been bought by someone who was using a smoky old diesel SUV that was no longer roadworthy.

So was your old car at the end of its life and recycled or is it still on the road? If the latter then your new Civic has significantly increased the amount of pollution above that which existed before.

[EDIT] I misread your last sentence.

So your old car is still on the road…

[devil]

But, presumably, somewhere along the line, there is a car that has been taken off the road, and almost surely one that polluted more than the hybrid does. No one can drive two cars at once and, as the native population of Cyprus is diminishing slightly, the number of cars on the the road is not increasing. Would you prefer the pollution from 300,000 clapped-out diesel pickups/SUVs with an average consumption of 15 l/100 km or more or 300,000 hybrids consuming less than 1/3 the fuel? Little-by-little, I would hope that Cyprus would change from one extreme to the other, in time.

Did you know a) Cyprus has the highest proportion of families with private vehicles in the EU (95%) and b) Cyprus has the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the EU (10.2 t/year), >50% greater than some other EU countries. This is partly because of cars. I'll let you work out what is behind this not-very-glorious record.

[The Microphone]

And next week the sky falls on our heads. The nett result of a drastic cut in fuel useage will be higher taxes elsewhere. The same reason they will not ban smoking or alcohol. MONEY!!!!!!!! If we all ended up with a donkey each eating cabbage, donkey crap would be taxed by the gram and cabbages would be £100 each! Nice idea though

[cyprusgrump]

But it is just as likely that somebody that was not previously a driver bought your old car – there is no guarantee that a car was removed from the road because you sold one on.

It seems to me that the roads in Cyprus are becoming more and more congested and I can’t see that there can be fewer cars on the road.

Unless another car was removed from the road when you bought your Civic, its manufacture and transportation to Cyprus has significantly increased your ‘carbon footprint’, not reduced it.

It makes me laugh when councils in the UK try and tax ‘gas guzzlers’ off the road by making it more expensive to park them or take them into ‘congestion zones’. It is pure folly to believe that the ‘guzzler’ will be removed from the environment – just sold on and replaced by another car that has been manufactured at the expense of a vast amount of energy and natural resources.

[devil]

Well, perhaps the EU will decide shortly that 105% of families in Cyprus has a car

Just look at the long term. An example is the USA, where there is already a distinct trend away from SUVs and other gas guzzlers in favour of more economical cars, including a million hybrids. It is not for nothing that GM, Ford and Chrysler have been having very lean years. Yet the USA is a country with very cheap gas and a neoconservative administration that has steadfastly refused to intervene, but the ordinary citizen defies this. Europe has expensive petrol and comparatively liberal governments but refuses to adopt more economical vehicles if they cost tuppence more in capital costs. A recent EU survey showed that 60% of respondents thought it desirable to reduce pollution but less than half of them would pay extra to help to do so.

If everyone took your reactionary attitude, we would still be polluting just as much (or more) 10 years hence.

[cyprusgrump]

If everyone took your reactionary attitude, we would still be polluting just as much (or more) 10 years hence.

The difference is that I don’t claim to be improving the environment while clearly making things worse.