Flickr/Sean_Marshall.Some rights reserved.While discussing the impact of methane on global warming, Jeremy Clarkson once quipped that “a Range Rover, doing 10,000 miles a year, produces less pollution a day than a cow farting.” Millions of people across the world worship Clarkson and, still, worship the car. China alone “gained an additional 17 million new cars in 2014, taking ownership to a record 154 million.”
If people cannot afford cars, ownership remains an aspiration for many: the 2013 Nielsen Global Survey on Automotive Demand found, for example, that “around four in five Indonesian and Thai consumers (81% and 79% respectively) intend to acquire a car within the next two years, as do three quarters of Filipinos (76%) and seven out of 10 Malaysians (71%).”
Yet, as we know, cars kill us. The number of global road traffic deaths every year – 1.24 million according to the World Health Organisation – is, in the WHO’s words, a “public health crisis.” Road transport in the UK (the vast majority of it cars) accounts for 22% of our total CO2 emissions, while “[a]bout 29,000 deaths in the UK are hastened by inhalation of minute particles of oily, unburnt soot emitted by all petrol engines and an estimated 23,500 by the invisible but toxic gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2) discharged by diesel engines.”
