-
Asked by agee1hear on 26 Apr 2024.
Question: My brother drives to work always...according to him it is faster than taking the bus; this contributes to global warming.... how do I convince him to stop despite the fact that he isn't into environmental science
- Keywords:
-
Martin McCoustra answered on 26 Apr 2024:
I guess he’s using a petrol driven car… Two points to make…
Frist, travelling by bus or train is much more environment friendly with 10 or 100s of people using a single transport device than 100s of people using cars. Much less energy is used to do so.
Secondly, if we drives only for 10 minutes each way and the car left the rest of the day, it will mean that the catalyst in his car if he driving a petrol car doesn’t warm up completely and does not work as well so the car will produce more pollution than is expected until the catalyst warms up.
-
Rebecca von Hellfeld answered on 3 May 2024:
I think it depends on how far he drives to work and where you live. For some people it is true that taking public transport takes more than twice as long to get to and from work, is more expensive, or just not possible. If the points made by Martin dont work, maybe instead ask him if at least he would consider car pooling with colleagues? If he drives past places where they could easily join him, it means that fewer cars overall are on the road but he still has the benefit of being flexible. It might not be the solution you wanted, but it might be a compromise?
Comments
Liz commented on :
Its only faster if he isn’t able to be doing something else on the bus. I take the bus or train as I can work whilst travelling which saves me loads of time.
Andrew commented on :
I imagine taking your own car will be faster than the bus, and you don’t have to worry about the timetable. But as Liz points out you can work on the bus/train (although does depend what your Brother’s job is). As Martin points out it is very bad for environment if everybody individually drives to work.
If we want to meet net zero a lot more needs to be done to encourage people to not use cars (even electric ones) for many journeys (particularity short ones with one passenger). But we have to accept people won’t do it if too difficult (takes too long, too inflexible, too expensive, etc.) so improvement to public transport is needed! I live close to a city centre and my work is based on the city centre also, so I can use the train very easily – many people are not so lucky.
The bus would be better but if not really possible then you could try to encourage your brother to look into car sharing, as whilst not as good a public transport much better than each person driving individually – also it would save his fuel bill!
Steve P commented on :
I don’t know how well your brother might respond to various methods of encouragement, persuasion or argument but here’s a selection of approaches that might help:
1) quantify the individual impact he is having – explore options using a tool such as the calculator at http://www.carbon footprint.com . (For example, using this suggests an average car with average mileage could produce in the order of 3 tonnes of CO2e per year. Using the bus typically cuts the CO2 emissions by about half for any particular journey).
2) consider the time and convenience of taking a car vs going by bus – if you can lead by example and show that you can make sacrifices for the environment, your pleas to your brother may get a better hearing. (People who only pontificate and don’t make sacrifices themselves are less likely to be seen as a ‘credible witness’)
3) calculate the impact of the whole national population of car/bus users and the impact if we were all to move, e.g., 10% (a random number likely to be more achievable than 100%) of our journeys from car to bus. Look online to find out what impact (e.g. in terms of a proportion of our national carbon reductions needed to meet agreed climate goals) such a change would make. (Such research yourself should help you to become more aware of the variety of information and tools that exist, and may help you to put things in another perspective for your brother).
4) ‘fair share’ arguements: on average UK population produces 1/5th more carbon per person than the world average, so surely it is fair that we all ‘do our bit’?
5) personal responsibility vs government action arguements: e.g. half of UK emissions come from a combination of transport and consumer action/expenditure and these are things for which citizens, not government, have the biggest influence on.
Thank you for your interest in saving our planet and good luck with influencing your relatives and friends.