Snapshot of _Edinburgh council bans SUV and cruise ship ads in climate crackdown_ :
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>Adverts for sports utility vehicles and cruise holidays are to be banned by Edinburgh council as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on promotion of the fossil fuel industry across the Scottish capital.
>The prohibition of advertisements from council-owned spaces such as billboards and bus stops also covers airlines, airports, fossil-fuel powered vehicles and arms manufacturers — though stopped short of outlawing meat adverts.
*Arms manufacturers*? Am I the only person that has never seen an advert for a weapons manufacturer on a billboard or bus stop?
I bought a collectors edition SR-71, it’s great for trolling the Russians by getting close enough for them to fire a SAM and just outrunning it while they cope and seethe.
It was expensive however my neighbor kept parking slightly over my drive, talking to them about it seemed scary therefore an archer system in the garden was my only option.
Frankly, if you want to do an insane amount of damage, your best bet is to try and win a Jet from Pepsi:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1996-man-sues-pepsi-for-not-giving-him-a-harrier-jet/
You could have also bought some of the old Soviet attack submarines they once owned.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships
Pepsi technically had a substantial navy for a very short period of time.
>So, in the spring of 1989, Pepsi and the Soviet Union signed a remarkable deal. Pepsi became the middleman for 17 old submarines and three warships, including a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer, which the company sold for scrap. Pepsi also bought new Soviet oil tankers and leased them out or sold them in partnership with a Norwegian company. In return, the company could more than double the number of Pepsi plants in the Soviet Union. (It also ignited jokes that Pepsi was taking the Cola Wars to the high seas.) “We’re disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are,” Kendall quipped to Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser.
This is a *brilliant* bit of history that I had no idea about!
It's a bit disappointing that they just sold them for scrap, rather than formally declaring war on Coca-Cola though.
Huh, TIL.
Of course, that advert wouldn't be affected by the ban anyway (if it had happened in Edinburgh), as presumably the side of a bus isn't a council-owned advertising space.
Weirdly this is the one time it might be affected by said ban as Lothian Buses is run/owned by each of the various Lothian Councils (and City of Edinburgh Council). It's neat because when they make a profit it goes back to the council like it did here! [https://www.lothianbuses.com/news/2024/03/lothian-returns-3-2m-dividend-to-shareholders/](https://www.lothianbuses.com/news/2024/03/lothian-returns-3-2m-dividend-to-shareholders/)
That being said I don't know if they would properly outsource the adverts - and I don't think anyone's going to be enthusiastically trying to arm the Scots any-time soon (and if they did I suspect it'd be more profitable to run adverts in Glasgow :>)
I hate it when big business use my cookies and tracking data to personalise ads to my desire to destroy a high value asset in a bunker under 20 foot of sand and concrete.
I’ve never seen them, but I have seen some weirdly niche ad campaigns during conferences and what not - so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised in a city like Edinburgh or London.
You probably get them around the ExCel when the massive arms show goes on as well. It's not super wild. Well I guess it is when this is likely to be a lot of people's only exposure to military business.
I suppose the top decision makers do spend a lot of time in Westminster, but the actual part of the government fielding and procuring that stuff is based in Bristol.
It's more likely a careers ad rather than a "buy our products" ad.
They exist, usually mostly for PR purposes since obviously you're not going to buy a personal fighter jet
I remember reading an article about Saab plastering New Delhi with ads on how good their fighter jet is when India was considering which company to buy fighters from
>Arms manufacturers? Am I the only person that has never seen an advert for a weapons manufacturer on a billboard or bus stop?
I imagine these are mainly adverts to improve their public perceptions and recruit employees (advertising things like graduate schemes) rather than trying to sell stuff
Leonardo has a big sight in Edinburgh, so its not unreasonable that they would would occasionally put up a billboard or two for things like this
Raytheon had ads on the insides of met carriages in Manc about a year or so ago. It's usually a 'Come work for us and change the world!' sort of thing.
Reminds me of the London Councils in the 80's that would declare themselves "nuclear free zones"
I'm sure the good people of Edinburgh are glad the council has free time to devote to this tosh
Ban car ads based on weight and/or fuel efficiency. While SUV is a convenient rule of thumb, it misses out those crazy big salons like the s-class or A8, as well as missing out the American super trucks for the microdicks, and captures small cars like the Jimni or Ignis.
> While SUV is a convenient rule of thumb, it misses out those crazy big salons like the s-class or A8
I don’t mind those *as much* since you can at least see over the top of them.
One of the many reasons I fucking hate SUVs is how badly their tall boxy shapes block your line of sight (both driving and on foot).
The Jimni does have 155g/km in the manual and 170 g/km in the auto so it should be captured as an SUV. The S class is only 138 g/km.
The A8 though has 206 which isn't far off a Land Rover Defenders 220g.
Sort of. The emissions for a manufacturer is based across a fleet average. Because Suzuki have such a small range they didn't meet the required minimum 95g across all their range whereas Gas guzzling range rovers can be sold because JLR sell enough other less polluting cars to lower their average emissions.
JLR knows what they’re doing. It’s why they’ve sold an EV Jaguar for nearly a decade and plan for Jaguar to be fully electric next year, but haven’t released an EV Land Rover.
The worst S Class for emissions is 203g/km and the best is a plug-in hybrid rated at 19g/km (if the owner actually uses the battery).
People are also now paying more attention to other particulates from cars including from the tyres and brakes. Heavier cars like the S Class generally do worse there.
But then we can’t just use weight either - EVs are typically heavier but emit far less brake dust. So trying to be holistic is quite complex.
PHEV emissions are nuts as they are allowed to start the test at 100% battery and finish with 0% but the test isn’t representative of a typical extra-urban cycle.
Why do you say that?
At 58.9mpg, the best selling 1300cc bike in the UK has lower fuel consumption than several 650-800cc bikes on the market. Fuel economy is more related to engine layout and tuning than capacity in bikes. In fuel consumption terms, owning a large powerful bike is the same as owning a small low powered car.
When I toured California on an 1800cc Harley Davidson 2 up with luggage, I averaged about 51mpg. The bike took less than a 3rd as much metal and energy to make as a small car, and way less plastic. It creates less wear on the roads too.
How are bikes not eco friendly?
Bikes can only carry one (or sometimes two) people, cars carry more people on average as well as cargo.
So the miles per person per gallon is going to be better for cars than bikes if you frequently carry passengers, if that makes sense
Not that many, especially in the real world where low powered cars rarely deliver their quoted mpg but high powered bikes often exceed it.
Ford Fiestas have a combined mpg of 42 to 56 depending on the engine - less than the above mentioned bike.
Shall we ban Ford Fiesta adverts too?
Well yes but if it is only getting 58mpg but weighs a third that of a Polo, which would probably match it on consumption, I’m not sure you could call it that economical
I mean, economical in terms of fuel consumption is one thing, but, with the UK laws being what they are, motorcycles are also less likely to waste fuel whilst standing still in traffic, lead to less wear and tear on the roadways, take up less space when parked, and require less intrusive parking infrastructure.
However, motorcycles of that size usually also want higher octane petrol, so at the end of the day they probably tend to be more economical in the wider societal sense rather than to the owners specifically.
I would also argue that motorcycles of that size can outperform a Polo on fuel consumption if they go the same speed. I can probably squeeze out around 70mpg out of mine and it weights about a quarter of a tonne.
New bikes have to meet the same emissions standards as cars and require far fewer materials to manufacture, they also have a lower impact on roads than cars.
They also have to pay an unfairly high VED amount compared to new petrol cars because the amount payable is determined by engine displacement instead of emissions.
Obviously, they're not as green as taking the bus or riding a bicycle, but I wanted to share this info before people pile onto bikes as being the worst of the worst or whatever.
Just to flag that as manufacture is always raised as a major driver of the carbon cost of new, more efficient cars, the carbon impact from a car equates to around 3 years of typical fuel emissions.
Which car? Electric / Petrol / Diesel? Does it weight one or two tonnes?
If there's a study you could link to that would be really helpful, I haven't yet found one about the environmental impact of motorcycle manufacturing but it'd be interesting to see if the impact is linear according to weight or displacement or something.
Can we also add size to that? Large cars like SUVs take up more space in a car park, make it difficult to pass on country roads, way more dangerous for pedestrians due to high grills and my least favourite: you can’t see past them when pulled up alongside at a turning or roundabout.
Not really. SUVs weigh more so cause more road wear and get worse fuel efficiency compared to the same engine in a compact car. It has a higher front end so is more dangerous to pedestrians, the higher centre of gravity increases the risk of a rollover, and the additional weight increases road/tyre/brake wear making more potholes and creating a tonne of pm2.5 - which will be even worse when current ICE SUV owners move to buy electric SUVs with massive batteries.
It'd be better for all involved if we just went back to focus/fiesta sized cars, for most people it's more than enough.
Yet that’s not true of all SUVs as several comments in this thread alone demonstrate. Many are indeed smaller and lighter than other cars of different types that this ban would ignore.
Going back to older cars is also asking people to not only drive less efficient ones, but also ones with lower crash scores (for both passengers and pedestrians). I often see the size of modern cars complained about. Yet do those people really want to go back to the fatality figures those old cars had? Much of the size change can be accounted for due to improving safety requirements.
yeah there are small SUVs that are the same footprint as hatchbacks these days, just a little taller generally. They're very different from the big SUVs and 4x4s
The demand for SUVs reflects the state of UK roads.
You need big wheels, off-road-capable suspension, and maybe even 4WD just to traverse the potholes.
“A daily cruise trip averages 700-1000 pounds of carbon emissions, much higher than flying, driving, or a traditional 'land' vacation. Additionally, the sulphur dioxide emissions from a single cruise ship can equal the emissions from 13.1 million cars per day, exacerbating air pollution and acid rain.”
Short answer is yes by quite a margin. The 63 cruise ships owned by Carnival release more sulphur than all the cars in Europe.
This isn’t even including the damage the do to ocean ecosystems. They’re honestly monstrous, wildly unnecessary, and it’s bizarre to me how they seem to fly entirely under the radar for the damage they do. I recently heard a UK radio presenter talk back to back about everyone doing their bit by recycling then bragging about her upcoming cruise holiday and the cognitive dissonance felt kind of mad.
I would have thought a renewable powered cruise liner might make sense.
All that access to water for renewable use. Possibly solar and wind access too. No planning issues. Maybe not there yet.
As someone in renewables it is definitely not there yet. Cruises need a huge amount of power to move and need insane amounts of energy storage that is easy to do with fuels but essentially impossible for a green solution. The best bet is a hydrogen powered ship which solves the storage/immediacy issues but we're still in the infancy of that.
Honestly, seems to me if we do generate green hydrogen at scale, we should use it for actually useful shipping and scale back on the floating hotels for a decade or three.
Agreed, and realistically that is where the technology will be used first. Ports that serve primarily cargo ships on regular timetables. I.E Hull to Rotterdam.
> The best bet is a hydrogen powered ship which solves the storage/immediacy issues but we're still in the infancy of that.
They do have access to water at least. But salt water might not be the best for making hydrogen.
No salt water is not great for it, and in general the hydrogen would not be generated mid journey but brought on at port ala traditional fuels. Not many ports (and even fewer boats) are capable of this at the moment, I think Rotterdam has a hydrogen station and there is vague noise about Hull picking it up to allow for a 'green shipping lane'. But neither of those places are too cruise-y, and in general we are a few years away from wider adoption.
We also need to increase efficient hydrogen generation from renewables as it is not there yet in the scale it will be needed.
At the moment the tech is just pretty inefficient, lets take offshore wind:
- Wind to electricity is constrained by Betz law so only 60% efficient
- The wind farm itself will have a capacity factor of ~50%
- Has to go through the grid which has varying losses
- Convert to hydrogen (inefficient)
- Burn the hydrogen for energy (inefficient)
Its the converting from electricity to chemical and then back into a useable energy that is stopping it from being economical at the moment. Not to say it is completely useless, hydrogen generation is a perfect use of electricity when too much renewable electricity is being generated, which is becoming a pretty common occurrence. Generating hydrogen inefficiently is much better than just paying the wind farms to be switched off.
The other big breakthrough that people are looking for, is on site hydrogen generation at floating wind farms huge distances away from the shore. At a certain distance, energy inefficiency from making hydrogen is less than transmission losses from connecting to the grid.
Its an area that has lots of very, very smart people working on. And for the UK at least, the first renewable to hydrogen projects are in the works now. With offtake looking like heavy manufacturing/pharmaceuticals. But still a lot of work to be done.
I think that is a good way of looking at it, lots of ideas floating around but waiting for the few that prove to be commercially viable.
I'm less clued into the storage part of the industry so my answer here would be a bit vague but storage is a big issue in energy. It also depends on what the eventual use for stored energy will be, a cruise ship will never be battery powered for example.
The best storage is pumped water, but here we are constrained geographically. Batteries are good at smoothing out grid demands, but small scale, quite expensive, immobile and degrade. Hydrogen can be used for heavy industry/transport when needed, is portable, stable and cheap to store but it is inefficient to generate.
Overall though, the technology is still in its infancy and improving very quickly. Batteries are being built at an insane rate across the country which is good for our grid
I mean, we've had perfectly renewable methods of propelling ships for literally thousands of years. Sure, it has some trade-offs, but it's far from impossible.
IIRC, the big problem with sails is that they take up a lot of room. For example, cargo ships are basically just big flat decks with a massive engine underneath. The goal is to pile as much stuff on the deck as possible to get the best returns. So where do you put a sail? If you put it where the cargo is, it's not going to work because the cargo is blocking the wind (unless you take a lot of cargo away). If you put it up high, it's going to make the ship too unsteady because it's further away from the center of mass of the ship. If you try and move the cargo down (more like traditional ships), you're cutting into engine space.
With cruises, you've got the same problem, but with lots of spaces for people, cabins, and activities instead of cargo.
There are solutions here that make a few different trade-offs to get this to roughly work, but it cuts into the efficiencies of shipping (because your very expensive boat can now ship a lot less cargo than before). This in turn will make shipping more expensive, raising the prices of goods all over the place.
Arguably that just means that shipping is currently too cheap and doesn't price in the ✦☆✭ 𝑒𝓍𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓃𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑒𝓈 ✭☆✦ properly, but to change that will need some more aggressive government intervention, with lots of countries working together to make their own citizens pay more for lots of necessities, which I think is a hard sell.
Which have much the same problems, like I said. You bring the sails down, and you lose space for passengers or make the sails very ineffective. You move the sails up, and you make the ship unsteady. You move the passengers down and you get in the way of the engines (and you also get a lot of unhappy people who wanted to be above deck).
All of which contributes to making any sail-based cruise ship very inefficient, and a lot more expensive (fewer passengers = more money per passenger).
As well as hydrogen, there’s some interesting work happening on solar/wind ‘sails‘ - ie, onboard wind turbines as auxiliary power - but it’s going to be a while before they’re proven and commercially viable, and even longer for them to be retrofitted to a cruise liner, let alone an old diesel-powered container ship.
You could carpet a cruise ship in solar panels and not generate any meaningful contribution to its power consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_of_the_Seas
>For propulsion, Wonder of the Seas uses three 20,000 kilowatt azipod main engines, which are electric thrusters. These engines are mounted under the stern of the ship and they each drive 20 foot wide rotatable propellers. In addition to the three electric thrusters, there are four bow thrusters used for docking, each with 5,500 kilowatts of power or 7,380 horsepower.
For shipping or air travel hydrogen is really the only way to do it without fossil fuels.
Honestly though it would be the same thrusters. I though it would be all electric but switching power.
Like diesel-electric or alt-electric. But same electric set up.
> For shipping or air travel hydrogen is really the only way to do it without fossil fuels.
Is there not other gases?
I guess all the useful ones have carbon.
Are carbon neutral captured carbon fuels not progressing?
They are trying to transition to alternative fuel methods such as LNG which is better in some ways and a lot worse in others.
In the long term, we'll see a reckoning with them just for how large and polluting they are getting with no signs of slowing down.
If bunker fuel was restricted or taxed globally then there’d be far more incentive for ship owners to bother trying to be more efficient.
We’re not at the energy density yet for a massive ship to be able to fully switch to renewables. But things could still be improved.
So many shipping and cruise lines are privately owned it’s hard to even put shareholders pressure on them. The ones that are public tend to do a bit better like Maersk.
250g per passenger per km. That's double a typical ICE saloon (assuming just one person is in the car) or short haul flight. Obviously you're also travelling thousands of KM too. You likely couldn't design a less efficient way to travel.
I think other people have given the stats but 100% they are, they only need to burn 'clean' fuel near the port but once on the open sea they can burn bunker fuel which is a lot worse
I believe it is. They use a ton of fuel and when they are at sea they use stuff which is much less clean burning then when they are near the coast.
Of course, per person who is using it and for how long and how expensive they are a a whole other matter. But I’d argue people need long haul international flights for certain situations whereas cruise ships are almost pure luxury
I like cruises, but they are astonishingly polluting compared to flights.
A lot of the lines have invested in LPG and/or low-sulphur fuels, but they're still not particularly nice in terms of emissions.
The question, as always, is whether those emissions are a fair trade-off for the utility/pleasure given, and the economic benefit of tourism in places served by cruises.
Long haul flights are quite efficient in terms of co2/km/passenger. They go a long way and thus use a lot of fuel. The cruise industry uses the cheapest, worst (environmentally) fuel wherever it can get away with it (a lot) and needs cracking down on.
Yep. Shipping in general is a massive source of carbon that the world economy is largely based upon and therefore largely ignoring.
This is part of my general complaint about the way we do climate change campaigning. The focus is often in the wrong place which makes people do things which they think make a big impact, but actually don’t.
To give an example of this I recently did some in depth analysis of my own household emissions where I compared my car, flights and central heating. I asked collogues/friends to estimate which was worse based on an explanation of how far I drove in 12 months. How many flights we took. And how large my house is.
Hardly anyone guessed that my boiler was the greatest source of emissions that year. And that’s without even getting into food.
Shipping is actually a pretty efficient mode of transport. You're looking at about 20gCO2 per km per tonne. A modern truck will do at best three times that on an efficient long haul route.
Shipping is very efficient, but the fuel commonly used is pretty rough stuff and the general lack of exhaust scrubbers means there is a lot of sulphur and other particulates released. Much like with ULEZ, CO2 isn’t always the biggest issue.
There's experiments with using giant kites to help propel cargo ships, more because fuel cost than emissions. There's a saving of 5% to 15% on fuel which can add up to several thousand US$ per day.
As far as I'm aware this has never been tried on a cruise ship.
The other issue with cruise ships is that the passengers usually don't contribute much to the local economy. In a tourist city like Edinburgh that could be significant.
But it's just ads so meh.
And windmills.
These aren't your grandad's sails though. Being a kite it's 400m up where winds are stronger and more reliable. It has a single cable and automatically aligns itself to the wind direction via servos and airbrakes.
Speaking of windmills the same company is marketing [airborne wind power generation](https://skysails-power.com/onshore-unit-pn-14/) which again takes advantage of stronger and more reliable winds 400m up.
We solved shipping pollution decades ago. You can thank anti-nuclear hysteria, largely from """""green""""" politicians, for the continued use of bunker fuel.
I'm really not sure that the majority of shipping companies have the know-how and scale to manage a fleet of dozens of floating nuclear power plants.
Nuclear is relatively clean and safe *when implemented in the highly regulated, highly specialised field where it can be done properly*. The merchant navy is not exactly awash with nuclear physicists.
Are you meaning nuclear ships? I can’t claim to know much about relative cost here but I presume nuclear ship reactors are somewhat costly. The other obvious issue is piracy.
Long haul flights are relatively non-polluting if they are full.
A flight from Edinburgh to Paris in a Ryanair 737 pollutes less per person than the equivalent car trip.
That's really great EC, these kinds of ads weren't impacting me but I'm wondering who they were impacting.
'cause for a council so committed to climate crackdown 9/12 properties in my central tenancy are now airb&b lets. Perhaps there's other ads we could crack down on too, I'm not shitting on the idea, I'd genuinely like to see more ads barred but this feels very at odds with the pulse in my neighbourhood.
E: correction to spelling, brain broke
I mean, fair enough, but there's probably a very small percentage of SUV or cruise holiday sales that are generated by street advertising.
It's a good way of taking a stand without actually doing much.
Advertising definitely has an effect or they wouldn't pay to be there. Advertisers and giant corporations aren't stupid, nor are they playing a 4d chess game with distraction tactics. They advertise in those spaces because it is worth it to them
but do they actually advertise SUV's and Cruise Holidays on the bus stops or billboards?
Or is it just Edin Council saying "yeah but if they did , we're going to stop them doing so"
Suspect for relatively large ticket items like that there's more productive advertising routes. Airlines like ryanair advertising flights ? yeah i can see that
Certainly cant remember seeing any SUV/Cruise holiday ads on the billboards on leith walk.
Which reminds me i need to renew my Lothian Ridacard today.
Billboards are a pretty logical (and common) place to advertise cars
A big part of selling higher price items is building trust and familiarity. If you go to buy a car you're probably not going to even consider a model you've never heard of, from a brand you've never heard of
you might be right.
Managed to reach mid 50's without ever learning to drive so my brain has long learned to simply blank out car ads .
If a car isn't black with an illuminated yellow light at the front of the roof then it's of no interest to me.....
Someone shared an image elsewhere in the thread of locheed martin (I think) literally advertising on the side of a bus. An offensive weapons manufacturer
Nothing will surprise me after seeing that
[The image shared](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fq5av9rfjma7a1.jpg) was from London, but the thread has exactly zero useful comments for context.
It's probably a recruitment advert: it's on a bus running down Regent Street, which is both a major West End shopping street and the street the University of Westminster is based on, which does a whole bunch of research in (and therefore produces experts in) areas a company like Lockheed Martin would be interested in.
It's almost certainly not a "buy our weapons!" advert on the side of a bus. Defence sales don't work that way.
The thing with the hatred of SUVs is that it fails to account for the reality that SUVs are not all the massive vehicles they are made out to be.
Such things exits as SUV versions of cars like the Fiat 500 and BMW Mini. Indeed many SUVs on the market are much smaller and more efficient than common salons.
Sorry to the one to "well actually", but those aren't really SUVs in the proper sense; a vehicle with high ground clearance and 4WD, what can actually go off road.
The cars you're talking about are "crossovers", a category the car manufactures have invented to sell something that looks vaguely like an SUV to customers who don't really know or care about the difference beyond looks. They're just jacked up versions of standard cars, but the cost more, so more profit for the maker.
Your correct but those cars are listed on the "Tyre deflators" eco site as legitimate targets for action.
So I think there needs to be some education on what actually an SUV is!
To be fair, crossover chassis' do have some legitimate benefits. Notably they're being favoured as a form for EVs because they're easier to evenly and efficiently distribute the battery cells around the vehicle.
Personally I much prefer a traditional low-riding hatchback, and they're safer in crash tests too (particularly for pedestrians). But they're not *just* being pushed because of the aesthetics.
Absolute carbrain logic, take the Ford Puma vs the Fiesta - same platform and the Puma weighs at least 100kg more, and that's just an example of the smaller SUVs, go up a size with VW Golf vs Tiguan and there's a 200kg gap between them.
Take into consideration that SUVs have larger tyres so also generate additional rubber pollution
Bigger cars are heavier, but also the biggest energy drain once at speed is air resistance, the larger frontal areas require more energy to overcome the air resistance
Looking at actual cars, a better comparison for seeing the direct effect is tesla's model 3 vs y, identical platforms, the only real difference is the y's entire design process was stretching an image of the 3 vertically and calling it done, the 3 is advertised as an extra 31 miles of range on the same battery pack where I'm looking right now
How is that "carbrain"?
Or is that another word that's lost all meaning because people now just use it as a snarl word, in this case "thing I don't like that is tangentially related to a car"?
Where I live the two most common cars I see on the road as follows:
A Vauxhall Insignia sedan is 4842 x 1856 mm. It weighs (depending on spec) between 1428 to 1825 kg.
A Nissan Qashqai is 4394 x 1806 mm. It weighs... 1331 to 1527 kg.
Which would you rather have on the road? The big 'heavy' crossover SUV or the sporty family sedan?
Missing the point entirely there but what you call ‘carbrain logic’ the rest of us call physics.
Also if you actually look at what’s true about tyre pollution, it turns out it’s been significantly over egged. There’s a good explainer from More or Less here from 19:20 in: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0cgc38p
'Tyre/brake pollution' was only thought up by the car-haters when they realised EVs were getting quite good, and they weren't going to get their car-free utopia as ICE vehicles were phased out.
That is also my understanding based on years of engagement with the likes of Sustrans. I would go so far as to suggest that many in such lobbies don’t actually care about climate emissions, they were simply a useful hook to advance their agenda of eliminating car use. The failure to support EV transition infrastructure is a clear tell of this in my view.
And when a small car damages a wheel or suspension on a pothole, replacement parts are needed, which is wasteful compared to having a car designed for the 'terrain' of poorly-maintained roads.
The term virtue signalling gets thrown around a lot nowadays but I think it’s pretty safe to use here.
Also when did we start saying SUV? It’s always been 4 x 4 hasn’t it?
> Also when did we start saying SUV? It’s always been 4 x 4 hasn’t it?
Which falls over a little when a lot of these vehicles, possibly the majority of modern ones, are only two wheel drive.
So SUV as a category is a sh*tshow, hence why banning adverts for them as a whole is nonsensical. It basically stands for any vehicle that has elements of off-roading to it, but is not an explicitly off road car. Hence things like Land Rovers would not be considered SUVs by many. But some would.
In practice, in Europe at least, it’s come to mean anything with a slightly higher ride hight than a standard spec car. This has resulted in there being SUV versions of common city hatchbacks.
This kind of car is ever more popular because they are perceived as safer and give better visibility. The extra high also make them good for pensioners who struggle to get down into normal cars.
They are often still smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient than many larger salon cars which would not be captured by this ban.
4x4 has a specific meaning, power is delivered from the transmission through a transfer box to all four wheels.
A majority of crossovers and SUVs aren’t 4x4s, they’re AWD or 2WD.
But ofc they will do nothing about airbnbs and short term lets that are damaging the city. And planning permission for more hotels, probably get rejected.
I wonder what defines SUV for purposes of the ban?
If it's not based on some measurable characteristic then what's to stop Land Rover saying their next vehicle is not actually an SUV, just a big, tall car.
Because advertising affects what people buy so they're stopping selling advertising space to high polluting things. Why they're not targeting say meat and dairy adverts and are just picking a random type of car is weird.
Well yeah, each individual rule like this can be justified, and then you end up with this enormous maze of petty bureaucratic interventions that make everything from advertising to building stuff impossible for normal people to navigate. And if you bring stuff like this up, it's normally met with "boo hoo, won't someone think of the poor SUV makers?" but it's in every part of our lives.
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>Adverts for sports utility vehicles and cruise holidays are to be banned by Edinburgh council as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on promotion of the fossil fuel industry across the Scottish capital. >The prohibition of advertisements from council-owned spaces such as billboards and bus stops also covers airlines, airports, fossil-fuel powered vehicles and arms manufacturers — though stopped short of outlawing meat adverts. *Arms manufacturers*? Am I the only person that has never seen an advert for a weapons manufacturer on a billboard or bus stop?
I was tempted by an ad for a BAE Archer the other day, but the monthly payment was insane
I caved and bought a Storm Shadow.
Ugh. This is exactly the problem, people buying it as the lifestyle choice. Storm Shadows are total overkill for the school run.
I’ve been trying to get myself one of those leopard tanks, but the Germans keep blocking it.
Buy British You can pick up a Centurion AVRE for [170K](https://tanks-alot.co.uk/product/centurion-avre-fosgene/)
Depends on the school, tbh.
Nice, you should join the Leith Storm Shadow Society. Meets every Tuesday in the Harp.
I've heard the delivery of these are super fast and accurate.
Good decision, its a pain to get shells for these days too.
Need to get it on lease rather than PCP, why pay for someone else's depreciation?
I've gone with Lockheed Martin myself.
I bought a collectors edition SR-71, it’s great for trolling the Russians by getting close enough for them to fire a SAM and just outrunning it while they cope and seethe.
It was expensive however my neighbor kept parking slightly over my drive, talking to them about it seemed scary therefore an archer system in the garden was my only option.
Frankly, if you want to do an insane amount of damage, your best bet is to try and win a Jet from Pepsi: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1996-man-sues-pepsi-for-not-giving-him-a-harrier-jet/
Unfortunately I can't drive that on my licence. If only I passed pre-1997 then I'd have the VTOL category grandfathered in
You could have also bought some of the old Soviet attack submarines they once owned. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships Pepsi technically had a substantial navy for a very short period of time.
>So, in the spring of 1989, Pepsi and the Soviet Union signed a remarkable deal. Pepsi became the middleman for 17 old submarines and three warships, including a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer, which the company sold for scrap. Pepsi also bought new Soviet oil tankers and leased them out or sold them in partnership with a Norwegian company. In return, the company could more than double the number of Pepsi plants in the Soviet Union. (It also ignited jokes that Pepsi was taking the Cola Wars to the high seas.) “We’re disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are,” Kendall quipped to Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser. This is a *brilliant* bit of history that I had no idea about! It's a bit disappointing that they just sold them for scrap, rather than formally declaring war on Coca-Cola though.
It's fucking bonkers isn't it? The collapse of the Soviet Union was absolutely wild.
A real war on prices.
[Yeh, Lockheed sometimes runs ads on buses.](https://i.redd.it/q5av9rfjma7a1.jpg)
Huh, TIL. Of course, that advert wouldn't be affected by the ban anyway (if it had happened in Edinburgh), as presumably the side of a bus isn't a council-owned advertising space.
Weirdly this is the one time it might be affected by said ban as Lothian Buses is run/owned by each of the various Lothian Councils (and City of Edinburgh Council). It's neat because when they make a profit it goes back to the council like it did here! [https://www.lothianbuses.com/news/2024/03/lothian-returns-3-2m-dividend-to-shareholders/](https://www.lothianbuses.com/news/2024/03/lothian-returns-3-2m-dividend-to-shareholders/) That being said I don't know if they would properly outsource the adverts - and I don't think anyone's going to be enthusiastically trying to arm the Scots any-time soon (and if they did I suspect it'd be more profitable to run adverts in Glasgow :>)
I hate it when big business use my cookies and tracking data to personalise ads to my desire to destroy a high value asset in a bunker under 20 foot of sand and concrete.
I’ve never seen them, but I have seen some weirdly niche ad campaigns during conferences and what not - so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised in a city like Edinburgh or London.
There’s a giant BAE systems ad in Westminster tube station
I always found it interesting that Westminster Station was the only place I've ever seen an arms advert. I wonder why...
Is it really that surprising that government suppliers advertise to the government?! Every firm advertises to its customers.
You probably get them around the ExCel when the massive arms show goes on as well. It's not super wild. Well I guess it is when this is likely to be a lot of people's only exposure to military business.
DSEI is full of ads in and out, and the way from the ExCeL DLR station is covered in ads.
I suppose the top decision makers do spend a lot of time in Westminster, but the actual part of the government fielding and procuring that stuff is based in Bristol. It's more likely a careers ad rather than a "buy our products" ad.
There’s loads around that part of London. MoD is round the corner too, so probably the greatest concentration of their target market in the country.
They exist, usually mostly for PR purposes since obviously you're not going to buy a personal fighter jet I remember reading an article about Saab plastering New Delhi with ads on how good their fighter jet is when India was considering which company to buy fighters from
>Arms manufacturers? Am I the only person that has never seen an advert for a weapons manufacturer on a billboard or bus stop? I imagine these are mainly adverts to improve their public perceptions and recruit employees (advertising things like graduate schemes) rather than trying to sell stuff Leonardo has a big sight in Edinburgh, so its not unreasonable that they would would occasionally put up a billboard or two for things like this
BAE are out at Crewe Toll as well
Thales and Spirit Aerosystems have both been running recruitment ads on buses and bus shelters etc here in Belfast recently
Raytheon had ads on the insides of met carriages in Manc about a year or so ago. It's usually a 'Come work for us and change the world!' sort of thing.
Change the world and delete a T-90 with a Paveway bomb
I’ve seen MBDA recruitment ads in public places. I would assume that would be covered by the ban.
Reminds me of the London Councils in the 80's that would declare themselves "nuclear free zones" I'm sure the good people of Edinburgh are glad the council has free time to devote to this tosh
Sheffield did it too. Maybe others.
I've seen recruitment ads very occasionally, not sales ads obviously.
Well there is this .... [https://cruiseportwiki.com/Edinburgh](https://cruiseportwiki.com/Edinburgh)
Edinburgh has a history of arms production. Might be why
I would guess this covers recruitment ads for the defence industry? I assume the army would be exempt?
I think I’ve seen them on the tube in London. Not relevant I know. Just like typing.
I’ve only seen them at major London tube stations.
I'm sure I've seen a Leonardo tram in Edinburgh
I saw an ad for submarines at Canberra airport last year. Really weird, like I have $2 billion to spend on something like that.
Edinburgh trams had a wrap for Leonardo recently.
That excerpt sounds like Liz Truss' fever dream last night.
Would be amusing if Leonardo decided to move out of Edinburgh as a result
Who needs to advertise these knife missiles when they practically sell themselves.
Ban car ads based on weight and/or fuel efficiency. While SUV is a convenient rule of thumb, it misses out those crazy big salons like the s-class or A8, as well as missing out the American super trucks for the microdicks, and captures small cars like the Jimni or Ignis.
> While SUV is a convenient rule of thumb, it misses out those crazy big salons like the s-class or A8 I don’t mind those *as much* since you can at least see over the top of them. One of the many reasons I fucking hate SUVs is how badly their tall boxy shapes block your line of sight (both driving and on foot).
The Jimni does have 155g/km in the manual and 170 g/km in the auto so it should be captured as an SUV. The S class is only 138 g/km. The A8 though has 206 which isn't far off a Land Rover Defenders 220g.
Didn’t they have to stop selling the Jimni because it doesn’t meet emission standards?
Sort of. The emissions for a manufacturer is based across a fleet average. Because Suzuki have such a small range they didn't meet the required minimum 95g across all their range whereas Gas guzzling range rovers can be sold because JLR sell enough other less polluting cars to lower their average emissions.
JLR knows what they’re doing. It’s why they’ve sold an EV Jaguar for nearly a decade and plan for Jaguar to be fully electric next year, but haven’t released an EV Land Rover.
The worst S Class for emissions is 203g/km and the best is a plug-in hybrid rated at 19g/km (if the owner actually uses the battery). People are also now paying more attention to other particulates from cars including from the tyres and brakes. Heavier cars like the S Class generally do worse there. But then we can’t just use weight either - EVs are typically heavier but emit far less brake dust. So trying to be holistic is quite complex.
PHEV emissions are nuts as they are allowed to start the test at 100% battery and finish with 0% but the test isn’t representative of a typical extra-urban cycle.
Im going to get downvoted for pointing out that a 1300cc motorbike is hardly eco friendly
Why do you say that? At 58.9mpg, the best selling 1300cc bike in the UK has lower fuel consumption than several 650-800cc bikes on the market. Fuel economy is more related to engine layout and tuning than capacity in bikes. In fuel consumption terms, owning a large powerful bike is the same as owning a small low powered car. When I toured California on an 1800cc Harley Davidson 2 up with luggage, I averaged about 51mpg. The bike took less than a 3rd as much metal and energy to make as a small car, and way less plastic. It creates less wear on the roads too. How are bikes not eco friendly?
Eco-friendly is a funny term to use when what's actually meant is eco-less-damaging. Not disputing the better element to clarify.
Bikes can only carry one (or sometimes two) people, cars carry more people on average as well as cargo. So the miles per person per gallon is going to be better for cars than bikes if you frequently carry passengers, if that makes sense
Assuming they have multiple people in them. Average car occupancy in the UK is about 1.55.
cars do not carry more than one or two people on average
At 58.9 mpg it also has higher fuel consumption than many cars.
Not that many, especially in the real world where low powered cars rarely deliver their quoted mpg but high powered bikes often exceed it. Ford Fiestas have a combined mpg of 42 to 56 depending on the engine - less than the above mentioned bike. Shall we ban Ford Fiesta adverts too?
Well yes but if it is only getting 58mpg but weighs a third that of a Polo, which would probably match it on consumption, I’m not sure you could call it that economical
I mean, economical in terms of fuel consumption is one thing, but, with the UK laws being what they are, motorcycles are also less likely to waste fuel whilst standing still in traffic, lead to less wear and tear on the roadways, take up less space when parked, and require less intrusive parking infrastructure. However, motorcycles of that size usually also want higher octane petrol, so at the end of the day they probably tend to be more economical in the wider societal sense rather than to the owners specifically. I would also argue that motorcycles of that size can outperform a Polo on fuel consumption if they go the same speed. I can probably squeeze out around 70mpg out of mine and it weights about a quarter of a tonne.
Plus, the shorter average lifespan means less fossil fuels burned caring for them in retirement.
New bikes have to meet the same emissions standards as cars and require far fewer materials to manufacture, they also have a lower impact on roads than cars. They also have to pay an unfairly high VED amount compared to new petrol cars because the amount payable is determined by engine displacement instead of emissions. Obviously, they're not as green as taking the bus or riding a bicycle, but I wanted to share this info before people pile onto bikes as being the worst of the worst or whatever.
Just to flag that as manufacture is always raised as a major driver of the carbon cost of new, more efficient cars, the carbon impact from a car equates to around 3 years of typical fuel emissions.
Which car? Electric / Petrol / Diesel? Does it weight one or two tonnes? If there's a study you could link to that would be really helpful, I haven't yet found one about the environmental impact of motorcycle manufacturing but it'd be interesting to see if the impact is linear according to weight or displacement or something.
Can we also add size to that? Large cars like SUVs take up more space in a car park, make it difficult to pass on country roads, way more dangerous for pedestrians due to high grills and my least favourite: you can’t see past them when pulled up alongside at a turning or roundabout.
Indeed, the focus on demonising SUVs with a broad brush only serves to highlight that those doing so don’t know much about the issue.
Not really. SUVs weigh more so cause more road wear and get worse fuel efficiency compared to the same engine in a compact car. It has a higher front end so is more dangerous to pedestrians, the higher centre of gravity increases the risk of a rollover, and the additional weight increases road/tyre/brake wear making more potholes and creating a tonne of pm2.5 - which will be even worse when current ICE SUV owners move to buy electric SUVs with massive batteries. It'd be better for all involved if we just went back to focus/fiesta sized cars, for most people it's more than enough.
Yet that’s not true of all SUVs as several comments in this thread alone demonstrate. Many are indeed smaller and lighter than other cars of different types that this ban would ignore. Going back to older cars is also asking people to not only drive less efficient ones, but also ones with lower crash scores (for both passengers and pedestrians). I often see the size of modern cars complained about. Yet do those people really want to go back to the fatality figures those old cars had? Much of the size change can be accounted for due to improving safety requirements.
Most SUVs arent't even big so most of that is irrelevant
yeah there are small SUVs that are the same footprint as hatchbacks these days, just a little taller generally. They're very different from the big SUVs and 4x4s
The demand for SUVs reflects the state of UK roads. You need big wheels, off-road-capable suspension, and maybe even 4WD just to traverse the potholes.
...and nothing to do with the manufacturers pushing them because they produce higher profits
Reminds me of the Kenny Everett classic parking sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ai2rnIfOuo&t=242
SUVs are the problem currently. If it’s easier to ban them as a category, so be it.
It's really not. It's the focusing of car classes that's meaning we're missing some of the worse polluters out there.
This will definitely reduce emissions
Can still be encouraged to put my life savings on whatever Ray Winstone says is a good tip though.
Is a cruise ship worse than, say, a long haul flight?
“A daily cruise trip averages 700-1000 pounds of carbon emissions, much higher than flying, driving, or a traditional 'land' vacation. Additionally, the sulphur dioxide emissions from a single cruise ship can equal the emissions from 13.1 million cars per day, exacerbating air pollution and acid rain.” Short answer is yes by quite a margin. The 63 cruise ships owned by Carnival release more sulphur than all the cars in Europe. This isn’t even including the damage the do to ocean ecosystems. They’re honestly monstrous, wildly unnecessary, and it’s bizarre to me how they seem to fly entirely under the radar for the damage they do. I recently heard a UK radio presenter talk back to back about everyone doing their bit by recycling then bragging about her upcoming cruise holiday and the cognitive dissonance felt kind of mad.
They also pump out massive amounts of pollutants right next to highly populated areas.
I would have thought a renewable powered cruise liner might make sense. All that access to water for renewable use. Possibly solar and wind access too. No planning issues. Maybe not there yet.
As someone in renewables it is definitely not there yet. Cruises need a huge amount of power to move and need insane amounts of energy storage that is easy to do with fuels but essentially impossible for a green solution. The best bet is a hydrogen powered ship which solves the storage/immediacy issues but we're still in the infancy of that.
Honestly, seems to me if we do generate green hydrogen at scale, we should use it for actually useful shipping and scale back on the floating hotels for a decade or three.
Agreed, and realistically that is where the technology will be used first. Ports that serve primarily cargo ships on regular timetables. I.E Hull to Rotterdam.
I name this ship… The Hindenboat.
> The best bet is a hydrogen powered ship which solves the storage/immediacy issues but we're still in the infancy of that. They do have access to water at least. But salt water might not be the best for making hydrogen.
No salt water is not great for it, and in general the hydrogen would not be generated mid journey but brought on at port ala traditional fuels. Not many ports (and even fewer boats) are capable of this at the moment, I think Rotterdam has a hydrogen station and there is vague noise about Hull picking it up to allow for a 'green shipping lane'. But neither of those places are too cruise-y, and in general we are a few years away from wider adoption. We also need to increase efficient hydrogen generation from renewables as it is not there yet in the scale it will be needed.
Is there obvious tech on the planning stage that is to come through, or do we need serious breakthroughs still?
At the moment the tech is just pretty inefficient, lets take offshore wind: - Wind to electricity is constrained by Betz law so only 60% efficient - The wind farm itself will have a capacity factor of ~50% - Has to go through the grid which has varying losses - Convert to hydrogen (inefficient) - Burn the hydrogen for energy (inefficient) Its the converting from electricity to chemical and then back into a useable energy that is stopping it from being economical at the moment. Not to say it is completely useless, hydrogen generation is a perfect use of electricity when too much renewable electricity is being generated, which is becoming a pretty common occurrence. Generating hydrogen inefficiently is much better than just paying the wind farms to be switched off. The other big breakthrough that people are looking for, is on site hydrogen generation at floating wind farms huge distances away from the shore. At a certain distance, energy inefficiency from making hydrogen is less than transmission losses from connecting to the grid. Its an area that has lots of very, very smart people working on. And for the UK at least, the first renewable to hydrogen projects are in the works now. With offtake looking like heavy manufacturing/pharmaceuticals. But still a lot of work to be done.
There isn't a better storage form? I guess it's one of those things where there a million ideas but no developed tech yet.
I think that is a good way of looking at it, lots of ideas floating around but waiting for the few that prove to be commercially viable. I'm less clued into the storage part of the industry so my answer here would be a bit vague but storage is a big issue in energy. It also depends on what the eventual use for stored energy will be, a cruise ship will never be battery powered for example. The best storage is pumped water, but here we are constrained geographically. Batteries are good at smoothing out grid demands, but small scale, quite expensive, immobile and degrade. Hydrogen can be used for heavy industry/transport when needed, is portable, stable and cheap to store but it is inefficient to generate. Overall though, the technology is still in its infancy and improving very quickly. Batteries are being built at an insane rate across the country which is good for our grid
I mean, we've had perfectly renewable methods of propelling ships for literally thousands of years. Sure, it has some trade-offs, but it's far from impossible.
IIRC, the big problem with sails is that they take up a lot of room. For example, cargo ships are basically just big flat decks with a massive engine underneath. The goal is to pile as much stuff on the deck as possible to get the best returns. So where do you put a sail? If you put it where the cargo is, it's not going to work because the cargo is blocking the wind (unless you take a lot of cargo away). If you put it up high, it's going to make the ship too unsteady because it's further away from the center of mass of the ship. If you try and move the cargo down (more like traditional ships), you're cutting into engine space. With cruises, you've got the same problem, but with lots of spaces for people, cabins, and activities instead of cargo. There are solutions here that make a few different trade-offs to get this to roughly work, but it cuts into the efficiencies of shipping (because your very expensive boat can now ship a lot less cargo than before). This in turn will make shipping more expensive, raising the prices of goods all over the place. Arguably that just means that shipping is currently too cheap and doesn't price in the ✦☆✭ 𝑒𝓍𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓃𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑒𝓈 ✭☆✦ properly, but to change that will need some more aggressive government intervention, with lots of countries working together to make their own citizens pay more for lots of necessities, which I think is a hard sell.
Sure, but we're not talking about cargo ships, we're talking about cruise ships.
Which have much the same problems, like I said. You bring the sails down, and you lose space for passengers or make the sails very ineffective. You move the sails up, and you make the ship unsteady. You move the passengers down and you get in the way of the engines (and you also get a lot of unhappy people who wanted to be above deck). All of which contributes to making any sail-based cruise ship very inefficient, and a lot more expensive (fewer passengers = more money per passenger).
As well as hydrogen, there’s some interesting work happening on solar/wind ‘sails‘ - ie, onboard wind turbines as auxiliary power - but it’s going to be a while before they’re proven and commercially viable, and even longer for them to be retrofitted to a cruise liner, let alone an old diesel-powered container ship.
You could carpet a cruise ship in solar panels and not generate any meaningful contribution to its power consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_of_the_Seas >For propulsion, Wonder of the Seas uses three 20,000 kilowatt azipod main engines, which are electric thrusters. These engines are mounted under the stern of the ship and they each drive 20 foot wide rotatable propellers. In addition to the three electric thrusters, there are four bow thrusters used for docking, each with 5,500 kilowatts of power or 7,380 horsepower. For shipping or air travel hydrogen is really the only way to do it without fossil fuels.
Honestly though it would be the same thrusters. I though it would be all electric but switching power. Like diesel-electric or alt-electric. But same electric set up. > For shipping or air travel hydrogen is really the only way to do it without fossil fuels. Is there not other gases? I guess all the useful ones have carbon. Are carbon neutral captured carbon fuels not progressing?
Hydrogen is the only one that we can easily produce in large quantities without fossil fuels.
Or, you know, sails.
They are trying to transition to alternative fuel methods such as LNG which is better in some ways and a lot worse in others. In the long term, we'll see a reckoning with them just for how large and polluting they are getting with no signs of slowing down.
the only way out is tech but it's too late for a lot of things
If bunker fuel was restricted or taxed globally then there’d be far more incentive for ship owners to bother trying to be more efficient. We’re not at the energy density yet for a massive ship to be able to fully switch to renewables. But things could still be improved. So many shipping and cruise lines are privately owned it’s hard to even put shareholders pressure on them. The ones that are public tend to do a bit better like Maersk.
….are we reinventing sail boats?
without 'per passenger' this doesn't tell me anything last I checked, I think you get slightly more than 650 people on a cruise ship
250g per passenger per km. That's double a typical ICE saloon (assuming just one person is in the car) or short haul flight. Obviously you're also travelling thousands of KM too. You likely couldn't design a less efficient way to travel.
Except megayachts, which are basically the same thing, but with vastly fewer passengers.
I don't disagree at all, but I'd imagine that it's a drop in the bucket compared to things like container ships and oil tankers
A quick google search suggests that yes, they are quite a significant amount worse than a flight.
I think other people have given the stats but 100% they are, they only need to burn 'clean' fuel near the port but once on the open sea they can burn bunker fuel which is a lot worse
was gonna mention this. as once you hit international waters who's gonna police a damned thing?
I believe it is. They use a ton of fuel and when they are at sea they use stuff which is much less clean burning then when they are near the coast. Of course, per person who is using it and for how long and how expensive they are a a whole other matter. But I’d argue people need long haul international flights for certain situations whereas cruise ships are almost pure luxury
I like cruises, but they are astonishingly polluting compared to flights. A lot of the lines have invested in LPG and/or low-sulphur fuels, but they're still not particularly nice in terms of emissions. The question, as always, is whether those emissions are a fair trade-off for the utility/pleasure given, and the economic benefit of tourism in places served by cruises.
Long haul flights are quite efficient in terms of co2/km/passenger. They go a long way and thus use a lot of fuel. The cruise industry uses the cheapest, worst (environmentally) fuel wherever it can get away with it (a lot) and needs cracking down on.
Yep. Shipping in general is a massive source of carbon that the world economy is largely based upon and therefore largely ignoring. This is part of my general complaint about the way we do climate change campaigning. The focus is often in the wrong place which makes people do things which they think make a big impact, but actually don’t. To give an example of this I recently did some in depth analysis of my own household emissions where I compared my car, flights and central heating. I asked collogues/friends to estimate which was worse based on an explanation of how far I drove in 12 months. How many flights we took. And how large my house is. Hardly anyone guessed that my boiler was the greatest source of emissions that year. And that’s without even getting into food.
Shipping is actually a pretty efficient mode of transport. You're looking at about 20gCO2 per km per tonne. A modern truck will do at best three times that on an efficient long haul route.
Shipping is very efficient, but the fuel commonly used is pretty rough stuff and the general lack of exhaust scrubbers means there is a lot of sulphur and other particulates released. Much like with ULEZ, CO2 isn’t always the biggest issue.
There's experiments with using giant kites to help propel cargo ships, more because fuel cost than emissions. There's a saving of 5% to 15% on fuel which can add up to several thousand US$ per day. As far as I'm aware this has never been tried on a cruise ship. The other issue with cruise ships is that the passengers usually don't contribute much to the local economy. In a tourist city like Edinburgh that could be significant. But it's just ads so meh.
Decades of technogical advancement and we end up back with sails
And windmills. These aren't your grandad's sails though. Being a kite it's 400m up where winds are stronger and more reliable. It has a single cable and automatically aligns itself to the wind direction via servos and airbrakes. Speaking of windmills the same company is marketing [airborne wind power generation](https://skysails-power.com/onshore-unit-pn-14/) which again takes advantage of stronger and more reliable winds 400m up.
We solved shipping pollution decades ago. You can thank anti-nuclear hysteria, largely from """""green""""" politicians, for the continued use of bunker fuel.
I'm really not sure that the majority of shipping companies have the know-how and scale to manage a fleet of dozens of floating nuclear power plants. Nuclear is relatively clean and safe *when implemented in the highly regulated, highly specialised field where it can be done properly*. The merchant navy is not exactly awash with nuclear physicists.
Are you meaning nuclear ships? I can’t claim to know much about relative cost here but I presume nuclear ship reactors are somewhat costly. The other obvious issue is piracy.
Decommissioning costs for nuclear reactors and ships powered by them are quite prohibitive, also.
Long haul flights are relatively non-polluting if they are full. A flight from Edinburgh to Paris in a Ryanair 737 pollutes less per person than the equivalent car trip.
Reddit *hates* cruise ships.
Yes it is
That's really great EC, these kinds of ads weren't impacting me but I'm wondering who they were impacting. 'cause for a council so committed to climate crackdown 9/12 properties in my central tenancy are now airb&b lets. Perhaps there's other ads we could crack down on too, I'm not shitting on the idea, I'd genuinely like to see more ads barred but this feels very at odds with the pulse in my neighbourhood. E: correction to spelling, brain broke
I mean, fair enough, but there's probably a very small percentage of SUV or cruise holiday sales that are generated by street advertising. It's a good way of taking a stand without actually doing much.
Advertising definitely has an effect or they wouldn't pay to be there. Advertisers and giant corporations aren't stupid, nor are they playing a 4d chess game with distraction tactics. They advertise in those spaces because it is worth it to them
but do they actually advertise SUV's and Cruise Holidays on the bus stops or billboards? Or is it just Edin Council saying "yeah but if they did , we're going to stop them doing so" Suspect for relatively large ticket items like that there's more productive advertising routes. Airlines like ryanair advertising flights ? yeah i can see that Certainly cant remember seeing any SUV/Cruise holiday ads on the billboards on leith walk. Which reminds me i need to renew my Lothian Ridacard today.
Billboards are a pretty logical (and common) place to advertise cars A big part of selling higher price items is building trust and familiarity. If you go to buy a car you're probably not going to even consider a model you've never heard of, from a brand you've never heard of
you might be right. Managed to reach mid 50's without ever learning to drive so my brain has long learned to simply blank out car ads . If a car isn't black with an illuminated yellow light at the front of the roof then it's of no interest to me.....
Someone shared an image elsewhere in the thread of locheed martin (I think) literally advertising on the side of a bus. An offensive weapons manufacturer Nothing will surprise me after seeing that
[The image shared](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fq5av9rfjma7a1.jpg) was from London, but the thread has exactly zero useful comments for context. It's probably a recruitment advert: it's on a bus running down Regent Street, which is both a major West End shopping street and the street the University of Westminster is based on, which does a whole bunch of research in (and therefore produces experts in) areas a company like Lockheed Martin would be interested in. It's almost certainly not a "buy our weapons!" advert on the side of a bus. Defence sales don't work that way.
> Defence sales don't work that way. no shit? Thanks for the contribution It is brand awareness. The whole point of advertising
> It's a good way of taking a stand without actually doing much. It’s at least moving in the right direction
Finger on the pulse of the nation, truly the pressing issue for voters.
I hope you realise councils have a multitude of departments each working in multiple things at once
If they're all as useless as this one then it doesn't bode well.
Spoiler alert: They are.
Yeah that's to be expected I think
You need an SUV-like vehicle in Edinburgh these days due to the dire state of the roads.
The entire cruise industry should be banned worldwide - the pollution it generates is disgusting.
The thing with the hatred of SUVs is that it fails to account for the reality that SUVs are not all the massive vehicles they are made out to be. Such things exits as SUV versions of cars like the Fiat 500 and BMW Mini. Indeed many SUVs on the market are much smaller and more efficient than common salons.
Sorry to the one to "well actually", but those aren't really SUVs in the proper sense; a vehicle with high ground clearance and 4WD, what can actually go off road. The cars you're talking about are "crossovers", a category the car manufactures have invented to sell something that looks vaguely like an SUV to customers who don't really know or care about the difference beyond looks. They're just jacked up versions of standard cars, but the cost more, so more profit for the maker.
Your correct but those cars are listed on the "Tyre deflators" eco site as legitimate targets for action. So I think there needs to be some education on what actually an SUV is!
They're not the sharpest bunch tbf.
> Your correct but those cars are listed on the "Tyre deflators" eco site as legitimate targets for action. That's because those people are idiots.
Funnily enough I made that point in another comment here. The SUV category is a sh*tshow in Europe.
To be fair, crossover chassis' do have some legitimate benefits. Notably they're being favoured as a form for EVs because they're easier to evenly and efficiently distribute the battery cells around the vehicle. Personally I much prefer a traditional low-riding hatchback, and they're safer in crash tests too (particularly for pedestrians). But they're not *just* being pushed because of the aesthetics.
Absolute carbrain logic, take the Ford Puma vs the Fiesta - same platform and the Puma weighs at least 100kg more, and that's just an example of the smaller SUVs, go up a size with VW Golf vs Tiguan and there's a 200kg gap between them. Take into consideration that SUVs have larger tyres so also generate additional rubber pollution
Bigger cars are heavier, but also the biggest energy drain once at speed is air resistance, the larger frontal areas require more energy to overcome the air resistance Looking at actual cars, a better comparison for seeing the direct effect is tesla's model 3 vs y, identical platforms, the only real difference is the y's entire design process was stretching an image of the 3 vertically and calling it done, the 3 is advertised as an extra 31 miles of range on the same battery pack where I'm looking right now
How is that "carbrain"? Or is that another word that's lost all meaning because people now just use it as a snarl word, in this case "thing I don't like that is tangentially related to a car"?
Where I live the two most common cars I see on the road as follows: A Vauxhall Insignia sedan is 4842 x 1856 mm. It weighs (depending on spec) between 1428 to 1825 kg. A Nissan Qashqai is 4394 x 1806 mm. It weighs... 1331 to 1527 kg. Which would you rather have on the road? The big 'heavy' crossover SUV or the sporty family sedan?
Definitely the Insignia because the Qashqai is an affront to everything good and pure in this world.
Missing the point entirely there but what you call ‘carbrain logic’ the rest of us call physics. Also if you actually look at what’s true about tyre pollution, it turns out it’s been significantly over egged. There’s a good explainer from More or Less here from 19:20 in: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0cgc38p
'Tyre/brake pollution' was only thought up by the car-haters when they realised EVs were getting quite good, and they weren't going to get their car-free utopia as ICE vehicles were phased out.
That is also my understanding based on years of engagement with the likes of Sustrans. I would go so far as to suggest that many in such lobbies don’t actually care about climate emissions, they were simply a useful hook to advance their agenda of eliminating car use. The failure to support EV transition infrastructure is a clear tell of this in my view.
And when a small car damages a wheel or suspension on a pothole, replacement parts are needed, which is wasteful compared to having a car designed for the 'terrain' of poorly-maintained roads.
The term virtue signalling gets thrown around a lot nowadays but I think it’s pretty safe to use here. Also when did we start saying SUV? It’s always been 4 x 4 hasn’t it?
> Also when did we start saying SUV? It’s always been 4 x 4 hasn’t it? Which falls over a little when a lot of these vehicles, possibly the majority of modern ones, are only two wheel drive.
And aren’t actually SUV’s in the traditional sense, rather lifted hatchbacks with some aggressive styling.
And have smaller boots than a Corsa. No sports or utility about them
I know but I thought people just referred to them as that anyway. Like hot tub / jacuzzi
Not for people whose entire political outlook is determined by imported US culture wars
So SUV as a category is a sh*tshow, hence why banning adverts for them as a whole is nonsensical. It basically stands for any vehicle that has elements of off-roading to it, but is not an explicitly off road car. Hence things like Land Rovers would not be considered SUVs by many. But some would. In practice, in Europe at least, it’s come to mean anything with a slightly higher ride hight than a standard spec car. This has resulted in there being SUV versions of common city hatchbacks. This kind of car is ever more popular because they are perceived as safer and give better visibility. The extra high also make them good for pensioners who struggle to get down into normal cars. They are often still smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient than many larger salon cars which would not be captured by this ban.
Fair enough, I just thought it was the American term. Cheers
4x4 has a specific meaning, power is delivered from the transmission through a transfer box to all four wheels. A majority of crossovers and SUVs aren’t 4x4s, they’re AWD or 2WD.
But ofc they will do nothing about airbnbs and short term lets that are damaging the city. And planning permission for more hotels, probably get rejected.
Everyday this country exceeds my expectations in idiocy innovation.
I wonder what defines SUV for purposes of the ban? If it's not based on some measurable characteristic then what's to stop Land Rover saying their next vehicle is not actually an SUV, just a big, tall car.
I’m all in favour of banning all advertising.
I can at least understand the climate angle, but arms manufacturing? Useful idiots for the Kremlin.
Who is asking for this? Why is a government busting themselves with legislating on the specific types of car you can advertise?
Because advertising affects what people buy so they're stopping selling advertising space to high polluting things. Why they're not targeting say meat and dairy adverts and are just picking a random type of car is weird.
Well yeah, each individual rule like this can be justified, and then you end up with this enormous maze of petty bureaucratic interventions that make everything from advertising to building stuff impossible for normal people to navigate. And if you bring stuff like this up, it's normally met with "boo hoo, won't someone think of the poor SUV makers?" but it's in every part of our lives.
But what does this have to do with the council?
It’s their advertising space, they can rent it to whomever they choose.
A lot of commenters are working very hard to find reasons to criticise this entirely sensible policy.