this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Kind of seems dumb to compare an entire industry to equivalent number of cars. The headline almost reads like 1 inhaler could equal hundreds of thousands of cars, but clearly nobody would be that stupid to think that.
Well. Maybe a few.
Its also incorrect because this clearly only considers fuel consumption which is much much less than the carbon created in the production of the car and all the other infrastructure
Why? Its more equivalent emissions than several states total vehicle emissions. CO2e is a consistent measure when looking at greenhouse gas emissions and cars are something people are familiar with.
From the articles page:
Its an enormous amount of emissions.
It's also only 5% of the new cars registered in California alone, by your own data.
And that's why it's bad to compare things to cars. Framing is an argument. Comparing something to the equivalent car emissions frames the issue a certain way. By providing an absolute number of cars it makes it seem like it impacts emissions the same as a significant chunk of the car industry (it does not, it is, again by your count, 0.1% of the total).
The headline "Inhalers drive carbon emissions equivalent to 530,000 cars each year, study shows" reads very differently to "Inhalers drive carbon emissions equivalent to 0.1% of the cars sold each year, study shows", which in turn doesn't read the same as "Inhalers emit 2.5 million tons of CO2 each year". All of which don't cover the main takeaway from the study, which is that specifically metered dose inhalers are surprisingly pollutant and more research should be done on how to effectively replace them.
I can't tell you how easily they could switch to low emission inhalers, but I can tell you what a bad headline looks like, and this is one.
That's literally an insane number of cars. Its literally more vehicular emissions than 60 countries.
At this point I'm genuinely interested in why this headline is breaking peoples brains. It seems like people are mostly having an emotional reaction to the fact that the study is critical of inhalers, and then, its a circle jerking/ dog-piling, what-about-ism, or the relative privation fallacy.
Its a bad thing that oil-tankers exist. We should all probably move on past internal combustion engines. It doesn't change the fact that, apparently, inhalers represent a quite substantial source of emissions.
Its not at all additive to dogpile on a headline that makes that point. Two things can be true at once.
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?