Public Transportation Not So "Green:" The Big Footprint when the Tailpipe is Tallied

If you have been waiting at the bus stop, or catching Amtrak to reduce your carbon footprint - sucker! Hey, you know you cannot believe the Greenies, and of course, that includes the completely devious Al Gore. As the idiots try to shove their "discoveries" down our throats, they haven't even taken into consideration something as simple as the true footprint of the tailpipe tally.

Public Transportation - Amtrak

A new study out of the University of California reveals that when the tailpipe emissions of public transportation are tallied, the pretty picture becomes "more complex." That's what happens when information is only partially divulged. I'm not an engineer, but even I know that public transportation has it's own footprint, and the explanation for why that footprint can be considered tiny would have to be excellent for me to believe it.

In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at UC Davis said "there's no overall solution that's the same all the time."

The pair give an example of how the use of oil, gas or coal to generate electricity to power trains can skew the picture.

Boston has a metro system with high energy efficiency. The trouble is, 82 percent of the energy to drive it comes from dirty fossil fuels.

By comparison, San Francisco's local railway is less energy-efficient than Boston's. But it turns out to be rather greener, as only 49 percent of the electricity is derived from fossils.

The paper points out that the "tailpipe" quotient does not include emissions that come from building transport infrastructure -- railways, airport terminals, roads and so on -- nor the emissions that come from maintaining this infrastructure over its operational lifetime.

These often-unacknowledged factors add substantially to the global-warming burden.

In fact, they add 63 percent to the "tailpipe" emissions of a car, 31 percent to those of a plane, and 55 percent to those of a train.

There's more about the importance of "seat occupancy," and "long-distance" trains. Read it at Breitbart.

The subject is convoluted and there are many, many things we can't fix, and many, many people we cannot believe. There are many dishonest endeavors to clean up our environment. The whole industry is a bunch of hoodlums, in my opinion.