Which polutes more : the car or the plane?

Question

Everybody keeps going on about how planes pollute the environnement so much and that taking a plane from london to NY is like driving your car 10 times around the world or watever but does anyone actually know the annual carbon emmissions released into the atmosphere by planes compared to that of cars? Surely cars pollute more because there are so many.

Answer 1

per passenger per mile a car is more enviromentally unfriendly but the aircraft is putting its carbon dioxide up in the stratosphere which is more harmful. so its a swings and roundabouts type conundrum. im sure Mr Brown will argue both either way when he wants to put the tax up on one of them.

Answer 2

The average distance travelled by 1 car multiplied by the amount of cars in the world far outweighs the amount pollutants that planes emit..Take for instant America with the big bang gas guzzling engines, they have millions of cars..don't want to even think of how much pollutants they produce.. anyway COWS make more pollution than anything else and that's a fact LOL.. just my thought..Regards

Answer 3

I think a plane pollutes more than a car because a plane needs a lot of gas. So therefore planes pollute more than cars, but this is only per unit. There are a lot more cars than there are planes so in total, cars add to the pollution more than planes do.

Answer 4

The biggest problem with aeroplane polution is that it occurs at high altitude.

An internal combustion engine on the ground does not produce the same pollution as a jet engine at 45000 feet. The biggest problem is the water vapour that they produce (visible as condensation trails). This creates more problems for the atmosphere at high altitude than at ground level.

You'll need to go into a lot of meteorological physics to understand the reasons why this is so.

Answer 5

Supprisngly - its actually true that every time you go on holiday on an air plane (even short haul) then you are often creating much more C02 than your whole years worth of car driving. They are not efficient at all !

Supprisingly, the company rhyanair (spelling?) has actually be found to have produced a whole 1% of the C02 creted by the whole world. Think about this, a single company is responsible for createing a such a large ammount of C02!

Answer 6

I've heard a couple of times that aviation only contributes around 2 or 3% to world pollution?

Answer 7

I just want to pull together what most people are trying to say. Your example is appears accurate on the surface, but the comparison isn't logical. Think about it this way, how many cars would it take to transport "x" number of people "y" distance. How many aircraft would it take to transport the same amount of people the same distance? Surely you can find some average numbers on the net to do the appropriate calculations. I am not going to do you homework for you! lol

Answer 8

The petrol internal combustion engine is quite inefficient. It produces CO2 but also CO and NO as well as other particulates.

I imagine the kerosene fuelled jet engine is far more efficient. I guess combustion is far more complete than in the car engine.

Answer 9

car if you divide the number of people on a plane vs a single person driving a vehicle.

Answer 10

Plane.