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Okay but the amounts must be pretty minuscule right? I mean compared to regular cars? How many go kart tracks can there be in the entire world? Can't be more than ten thousand.
Oh for sure, and the number of karts themselves is likely lower than that of regular cars, plus they've smaller engines anyway.
But it's more in terms of what the other folks mentioned as "pollution as entertainment", like fireworks. Can't help but wonder if the future generations will look at the entertainment of our era the way we do at things like fox hunting (the one with the hounds) or human sacrifice
Some amount of pollution is inevitable. The natural environment has the capacity to absorb and deal with it up to a certain amount. The problem is that the scale of modern society is so huge that the amount of pollution we are producing is orders of magnitude more than the environment can absorb. The use of cars as it is currently practiced is not sustainable. But if we eliminated the use of cars for transportation and were only left with forms of entertainment like go-karts that probably would be sustainable.
One thing i am sure of is that the number of go-karts is not just "likely lower" but certainly much, much lower, as in many orders of magnitude lower. So these two problems are really not even comparable.
Out of curiosity i tried doing some rough maths on this.
First i looked up how many go-kart tracks there are in the world and didn't come up with a definitive answer, but i did find that there are around 1.5k in the US.I think it's safe to assume that since this form of entertainment was popularized in the US and the US has the culture most obsessed with cars that the US would have the most by far on a per capita basis. I also don't think that go-karting is very widespread in the global south, so we're left with only the "developed" world and out of that the US likely makes up the largest chunk. Putting all this together I think that even my 10k upper limit is probably too high an estimate.
What is the average number of go-karts that a track owns? Again i have to estimate but i would say it's probably somewhere between ten for the smallest tracks and a hundred for the biggest. Though even the biggest tracks probably can't fit all of their vehicles on the track at one time. And like cars they also aren't running 24/7. So all in all i think you could estimate that there are maybe somewhere in the vicinity of 250k actively used go-karts in the world.
As for cars, i've seen put the total number of cars in the world at something like 1.5 billion, 20% of which are in the US (which i expect to see reflected in the proportional number of go-karts, possibly even more skewed toward the US and Europe since i don't know how popular go-karting is in Asia). I don't think this number includes heavier vehicles like trucks that are mainly used for transportation. Anyway let's say that of those only 80% are actually being frequently used and the rest sit mostly idle. That still leaves us with 1.2 billion.
I know this was all basically a bunch of very rough estimates but i think it's safe to say there are at least five thousand times more cars than go-karts in the world.