I find it difficult to take these articles seriously when we know there’s a few dozen companies producing 70% of emissions globally and AI companies are all throwing away any carbon progress.
Stop worrying about my inhaler that I need to live and go chase Exxon and Aramco ffs.
Read the article. The issue is one particular type (puffers) that use HFA propellant. Some people need them, but they’re used mostly because they are cheaper for the insurance company, which is a problem because HFA is a powerful greenouse gas. No one is saying that you shouldn’t have an inhaler or that we shouldn’t also go after Exxon and Aramco.
Candidly all I’ve know is propellant inhalers, because that’s what my doc prescribed. It’s fast working, simple to pack and effective. If the alternatives are proven to preform similarly, I’m not against it.
But I can’t help but feel if the alternatives were as described, we wouldn’t be using propelled inhalers to begin with?
Overall I’m mostly tired of hearing how we can collectively sacrifice to make a 0.02% gain here, maybe a 0.05% gain there - while we all know where the real problems are and my city is busy installing yet another car lane.
Edit- I did some reading on dry inhalers, it seems you have to inhale hard enough and hold your breath to take the dose. I’m not sure if anyone in this research has had an asthma attack, but expecting someone to inhale during an episode to deliver the medication seems a bit pants on head.
Overall I’m mostly tired of hearing how we can collectively sacrifice to make a 0.02% gain here, maybe a 0.05% gain there - while we all know where the real problems are and my city is busy installing yet another car lane.
Hm. According to someone else’s math and then some correction, I think it is about a 1.5% gain. 100 divided by 13-to-1 divided by 5x overcount.
(Edit: Fixed the math)
Edit- I did some reading on dry inhalers, it seems you have to inhale hard enough and hold your breath to take the dose. I’m not sure if anyone in this research has had an asthma attack, but expecting someone to inhale during an episode to deliver the medication seems a bit pants on head.
Yeah, I get that. Maybe the solution is to switch to some propellant that doesn’t kill the climate, presumably HFA is not the literal only one that exists.
I much prefer my powder inhaler because I can feel the difference much faster, but yeah it wouldn’t be great in an asthma attack situation. It’s not something you can take a quick puff of, and the lever mechanicism on most of them would be impossible to operate in quick succession while struggling to breathe. My local practice doesn’t like to give out reliever inhalers anymore, as they believe if you need a reliever then really it’s your preventative inhaler that needs to be increased in dosage, and it just means if I’m sick with the cold or something then I’m totally reliant on the slower powder inhaler to get air into my lungs. There’s a cruel irony to the fact that climate change has caused an increase in asthma and now we’re being blamed for causing it with our evil lifesaving medication.
If the cars weren’t producing pollution I wouldn’t need a damn inhaler
They didn’t show their methodology but their math seems way off.
Google says 1 car emits 4,500 kg co2 per year.
Assuming 1 inhaler is completely filled with the environmentally worst HFC propellent ( no medicine just propellent) you get 27 kg of CO2 equivalent from 1 inhaler.
Google says 60 to 200 doses per inhaler.
4500/27 = 166 inhalers = 9,960 doses to equal a car.
Google says 2 doses a day is worst case.
That’s 13 years of inhaler use to equal 1 year of a car.
That’s 13 years of inhaler use to equal 1 year of a car.
Yeah, and since there are 70 million inhalers prescribed each year, and the majority of them are puffer inhalers, we could say 51% are puffers and the emissions impact is equivalent to 70 million inhalers / 13 inhaler-years per car-year * 51% => 2,746,153 cars.
I assume that it’s 5 times too large because the inhalers are not just filled with propellant and nothing else, but that seems roughly on par. Right? To me, the takeaway is that if a lot of inhalers are one-thirteenth as bad as driving a car, then that means this is a significant thing to look at (especially for people for whom there is a trivial way to replace it with something else). Maybe they picked a misleading way of presenting that fact but it doesn’t seem false to me.
(https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/09/is-your-asthma-inhaler-bad-for-the-environment for the 70m figure)
Why don’t people with asthma inhale on exhaust pipes instead of inhalers? It would stop the need for inhalers and reduce the emissions of cars. People are idiots
I’m bad at budgeting somebody help me balance this:
Enough inhalers for 340 Million people: 100 Carbon Credits 500K Ninja swords (that cause asthma): 100 Carbon Credits
