Inhalers are the frontline treatment for asthma and COPD, but they come with a steep environmental cost, according to a new UCLA Health study—the largest to date quantifying inhaler-related emissions in the United States.
Researchers found that inhalers have generated over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually over the past decade, equivalent to the emissions of roughly 530,000 gas-powered cars on the road each year.
Cool.
How much is a megagram of carbon? or of CO2? How many trees is that?
What do you picture when you think of that? Is it something you have an intuitive reference for? Almost assuredly you don’t. Very few people do could tell you about how many hectares of a typical temperate first would be required to be set aside annually to store or sequester that 500k megagrams of carbon (hint: alot).
Hand wringing because they didn’t use a unit even, likely, that you would likely have no clue how to understand it’s interpretation, is misguided at best.
It’s appropriate to communicate through units people understand; the real problem is their use of a number which is also practically incomprehensible. Using cars is fine, using 500k is problematic, because few if any human has a context for what 500k cars looks like.
A more appropriate units conversion might have been that the inhalers have emissions equivalent to all the vehicle emissions of states A, B and C
That might have been only slightly more appropriate but even then it doesn’t represent one industry to another but instead some arbitrary metric.
If Carbon Emissions were a Pie then this would be just one incredibly tiny sliver.
Like… Yes it absolutely does. Thats why we move EVERYTHING to CO2e for papers like this. CO2e is the lingua franca of discussing global warming. Its how we can compare cows to cars to trees to inhalers.
So that’s a totally different argument, and if it represents more emissions (from vehicles) than 15 US states, I would hardly agree with you.
If Nebraska, or New Mexico, or Idaho, announced “We’re going to outlaw all internal combustion vehicles to curb greenhouse gas emissions”, would you dismiss that like you are dismissing this?
At the low end, typical northwest forest pulls in almost 6 megagrams per hectare in biomass annually. To just offset just these emissions, we would need to set aside about 321 sq miles of forest. That’s hardly a trivial amount.
WE DIDN’T COMPARE CARS TO INHALERS. WE COMPARED ALL INHALERS BEING MADE TOTAL TO SOME ARBITRARY NUMBER OF CARS.
Its not an arbitrary number of cars? Did you just, not read the article (or even the headline for that matter)?
Its a specific number of which equates vehicle emissions to the CO2e of the annual number of inhalers.
The annual rate of prescribed inhalers (1.6 billion) results in about the same CO2e as ~530k annual vehicular emission. Why is this breaking your brain?