this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Several states have lower than a million pop out of the USA's total 340 Million people, my point is that this is equivalent to measuring things in murican units like hamburgers, football fields, and Olympic swimming pools. I think drawing comparison to cars and other pollution sources totals is helpful and showing a precise per unit amount of pollution is good and informative, but taking the entire industry and measuring it in cars is stupid.
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?