ABD - The Car: The Environmental Scapegoat

The Association of British Drivers
The Car:
The Environmental Scapegoat

You, your wallet and your car are victims of a propaganda war

A war of disinformation and misinformation is being waged by a powerful and vociferous minority of people, backed by much of the media, and wilfully exploited by Government. Their aim is to persuade you that your car is bad for your health. They want you to think that the motor-car is the chief, indeed possibly the only, environmental enemy, and the primary source of air pollution.

It is not true!

But they are conspiring to make your use of your car as difficult and expensive as possible.

The Truth

The fact (which the papers will not tell you) is that only a relatively small proportion of most pollutants (about 20%) comes from cars.

For example: only 29% of all Volatile Organic Compounds and 26% of all Nitrogen Oxides (the two gases principally linked to the production of ground level ozone); and only 13% of all man made Carbon Dioxide emissions (one of the gases linked with global warming) emitted in the U.K. come from petrol-driven vehicles.

Tighter controls and better technology mean that these proportions are set to fall in the coming years.

Furthermore, research done by the RAC in London shows that most of the pollution comes from a small number of vehicles: 10% of vehicles cause 44% of London's traffic pollution, while the cleanest 70% of vehicles were responsible for just 18% of the pollution.

In addition, a recent survey revealed that London's buses, taxis — many of them years old — and poorly maintained light- and heavy good vehicles are amongst the worst polluters of all!

Asthma attack!

Newspaper campaigns have run for many months trying to implicate car exhaust emissions in the search for a cause for the dramatic rise in asthma cases in this country.

It is not true!

Research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency indicates that air pollution within the home can be up to 70 times higher than outside!

It is believed that a dangerous cocktail of chemicals created by dry-cleaned clothes, air fresheners, cigarette smoke and chlorinated water, combined with household dust-mites and their excrement are probably the main factors behind the asthma epidemic — not the car. Car-based pollution has already fallen dramatically and will continue to fall. It is high time indoor pollution was tackled! More on Asthma....

Cars are getting cleaner all the time

Cars on sale today are very clean, producing only a fraction of the exhaust gases of older models. New cars on sale from 1996 will emit the following amounts of gas compared to their 1970 equivalents (1970 = 100):-

Despite the enormous increase in traffic over the past 25 years, our urban air will be cleaner than it was in the 1960s — and will continue to improve steadily into the next century as the national vehicle fleet is replaced.

The fall in air pollution levels in the U.K. began around 1990, and is now well established, according to findings published by the Government's own Warren Springs Laboratory.

Acres of tarmac

We are constantly subjected to propaganda about how the whole of Britain will soon disappear under a sea of tarmac.

It is not true!

Motorways currently take up about 0.1% of total land area in the U. K. Even increasing the motorway network by half would just raise this total to just 0.15%. A quick glance at a map of Europe shows how much denser the motorway network in Germany, Holland and Belgium is compared to here. Those countries are not "covered in tarmac" either!

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